


Unrelenting Sunrise

by Honey_Badger001



Series: Beneath our Sky [1]
Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: Angst, Chris tries to break 8 other dudes out of a prison-like facility, District 9 inspired, Drugs, Existentialism, Felix is special, I Blame Tumblr, M/M, No Smut, Oops, Self-Medication, TW: brainwashing and mind control, a sign an omen a- a glitch, but there are a lot of dark undertones, corporate dystopia, dystopian au, guess who the glitch is hehehehe, i promise its not as dark as i make it seem, no beta we die like men, not in my christian household, shameless stray kids references, slow burn?, so idk just be warned, stray kids au, updated whenever i feel like it, watch me bash capitalism in the form of a fic, wow we really went dark there didn't we
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-06-08 17:51:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 27,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19475659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Honey_Badger001/pseuds/Honey_Badger001
Summary: Among white walls, white screens, white uniforms, white everything, they all forgot that there is a world beyond The System, beyond the Districts, beyond the seemingly all-powerful and ever-watchful LIONS INC. that runs their entire life. They didn't notice the signs; they ignored the omens that spoke of a time of revolution and rebellion soon to come.But Chris isn't stupid. He didn't become Corrections Officer at the LIONS INC. Correctional Facility without using his brain.All it took for him to change his mind was a glitch in the system.And no one could stop the unrelenting sunrise.





	1. New Arrivals

[ P l e a s e e n a b l e c h a n g e s t o s y s t e m d a t a b a s e ]

Chris raised his left wrist towards the scanner while typing with his right hand.

>> **C B 2 9 9 7 ; C O**

>> *** * * * * * * * ***

[ A c c e s s g r a n t e d ]

>> i m p u t d a t a : **s e c t o r 5**

>> n e w a r r i v a l s : **2 7**

[ s a v e c h a n g e s ? ]

**[ y e s ]** [ n o ]

**[ o p e n g a t e 5 ]**

Chris watched through the screen as the bus pulled in through the unlocked gate, which immediately shut behind it. White figures of other Corrections Officers swarmed it as soon as it pulled into the designated parking space. 

[ p l e a s e p r o c e e d w i t h r e g i s t r a t i o n . 

y o u r t i m e r e m a i n i n g i s : **3 2 0 . 2 9** m i n u t e s ]

He glanced back at the monitoring screen. The white Corrections Officers were standing around two busses. He knew that the kids inside must be changing at this point. 

[ y o u r t i m e r e m a i n i n g i s : **3 1 9 . 5 7** m i n u t e s ]

Chris sighed. Why did management always insist that they get through the registration process this quickly? He doesn’t even know any of the kids he’ll be in charge of. This was only his third ever assigned group that he had to take care of, and he already knows that it’s going to be a hassle, like the last two times. 

His monitor beeped.

[ I n c o m i n g m e s s a g e f r o m W K 3 9 8 3 ; C E ]

>> _g e t y o u r l a z y b u t t d o w n t o t h e a r r i v a l p l a t f o r m_

Chris snorted. 

_S u r e t h i n g W o o j ._ _I k n o w y o u ’ r e d y i n g w i t h o u t m e t h e r e :)_ <<

With one last look at the monitor, he stowed the scanner away in his pocket and took the stairs down to the arrival platform. When he first arrived here, in LIONS INC. Correctional Facility STR0325, his head would sometimes hurt because of all the white. White walls, white uniforms, white chairs, desks, screens. White everything. With time, Chris got used to it, but he knew that a lot of the kids arriving would have the same issue as he did.

[ y o u r t i m e r e m a i n i n g i s : **3 0 1 . 0 5** m i n u t e s ]

As he walked through the doors towards the assembly platform, he was greeted with twenty-seven new and confused faces. 

“You made it, thank God,” Woojin greeted him, holding a tablet, “the new kids are getting antsy.”

Woojin’s job as a Correctional Educator was to monitor these kids’ progress under The System, to re-educate them and to assign each of them tasks that would help them towards their recovery. Chris’ job was to manage their general recovery: House them, feed them, supervise them. 

He quickly climbed up on the small elevated podium that served as a stage, grabbing a microphone. Twenty-seven faces turned to look at him, and all low murmur stopped. 

“Hello arrivals of Bus 4419, and welcome to LIONS INC. Correctional Facility STR0325! My name is CB2997, and this is WK3983,” he pointed to Woojin, who had climbed up next to him,”but don’t worry if you can’t remember that. You can refer to us by our first names: I’m Chris, your Corrections Officer and General Guidance Counselor, and this is Woojin, your Correctional Educator.”

He looked around the room. He saw confused faces, scared faces, angry faces. He saw some kids fiddling with the cuffs of their white uniform hoodies, and some shuffling their feet.

“You are here because you displayed worrying behavior during your training period, and it is our job to help you correct your mistakes and ensure that all twenty-seven of you become full-fledged members of society, and of LIONS INC. 

You will be spending the rest of your training period here. For some of you, who are nineteen, this may only be a year, but those of you who are sixteen will be spending the next four years with us, until you are ready to take on the responsibility of being a LIONS INC. employee. 

Woojin and I are here to help you. If you have any concerns, complaints, or questions, don’t hesitate to ask us! We will do whatever we can to make you feel welcome and comfortable here.”

Chris stepped back and let Woojin to the microphone. As Woojin introduced himself and began talking about the daily structure, meal times, and lesson plans for the twenty-seven teens, Chris let his gaze wander through the crowd. 

His previous two assignments were mostly eighteen or nineteen year olds, so almost all of them were twenty and had already graduated from The System to move on to their respective jobs within LIONS INC. 

These new arrivals were younger. So young… Chris was confused as to how someone so young could already be causing troubles with management, but he supposed that was just teenage rebellion. Better to stop it now and teach these kids how to live in their community instead of letting that rebellion fester, he supposed. 

His eyes searched the crowd. Pale faces, tanned faces, faces that obviously wore makeup or piercings until just a few minutes ago, when all the kids were asked to change into their new uniforms and take off all excess belongings upon arrival. The freshly scrubbed faces surely belonged to the elite; makeup was a luxury that not many from, say, his home, could afford. 

Chris huffed. Many of these rich kids didn’t belong here. The elite insisted on paying their way into a favorable job positions for their kids; the polls and selections were carefully manipulated. It was like a game. Rich families with big shareholders in LIONS INC. pitted their children against each other, bribed officials, and tried to bring the children of other big families down. Chris was sure that some of the teens here never committed an offense. Bribing someone to send the children of rival families into Correctional Facilities was, for some, a sick method of revenge. 

Suddenly his eyes stopped their wandering. He was looking directly into the eyes of another, of someone who wasn’t watching Woojin as he droned on about sleeping schedules, but was watching Chris instead. Chris felt trapped by those honey eyes that seemed to see straight into his soul. 

The owner of these eyes had reddish hair, high cheekbones, heart-shaped lips, and… were those freckles? He couldn’t really describe what he was feeling, only that it was a lot. Intrigue, interest, curiosity, fear, apprehension, ~~attraction~~ … Chris _needed_ to know more about this person. Why was he here? He didn’t look human; he looked enchanting, otherworldly, fairy-like, perfect. It made Chris want to write songs, tell him all his secrets, pour his soul out. 

Whoever he is, Chris realized, he is _dangerous._

“But don’t worry, your individual schedule is also posted in your assigned room, and Chris and I will chaperone you to your classes at all times, so there is no way you can get lost!” Woojin finished his speech, and Chris slowly came back to life. He tore his gaze away from those eyes and cleared his throat, stepping back to the microphone. 

“Now that we have explained everything to you, it’s time for you all to line up. Please show me your Identification code, and I can enter you into the system. It won’t take long, and afterwards we can move you to your rooms to get settled for the day.”

Chris stepped down from the podium and sat down at the desk in front of it, while Woojin separated the arrival platform into two sections using some rope line dividers. One section was for those who are yet to be entered into the system, and the other for those who are already in. Chris pulled out this monitor and called the first in line over to take a seat.

[ y o u r t i m e r e m a i n i n g i s : **2 1 6 . 8 7** m i n u t e s ]

>> F u n c t i o n : **E n t e r n e w d a t a**

[ P l e a s e s c a n w r i s t I D ]

“Give me your left wrist please.”

The teen handed his wrist over to him wordlessly. 

[ C o n f i r m s c a n : M L 0 0 9 8 ; E C ]

**[ c o n f i r m ]** [ d e c l i n e ]

“What’s your name?” he asked, probingly. The two zeroes in the front of the code meant that he must be from the elite.

“Lee Minho. I don’t know why I’m here.”

Chris sighed: “That’s alright. Rarely anyone ever does. Alright, you’re good to go.”

The teen thanked him and walked over to the other end of the arrival platform. 

[ y o u r t i m e r e m a i n i n g i s : **2 1 4 . 1 9** m i n u t e s ]

>> F u n c t i o n : **E n t e r n e w d a t a**

[ P l e a s e s c a n w r i s t I D ]

Chris waved the next one towards him. This teen looked gloomy and refused to meet his eyes. Black bangs were covering his forehead. 

[ C o n f i r m s c a n : C S 5 7 2 1 ; S T ]

**[ c o n f i r m ]** [ d e c l i n e ]

“And what’s your name?”

S E O C H A N G B I N , as the monitor read, remained silent. 

Chris looked at him with pity. The first two numbers of your code refer to how close you live to LIONS INC. Central (with numbers 00 ofcourse meaning you live in the dead center), and by looking at the five in front, Chris knew that this boy grew up in one of the worst slums around LIONS INC. District 5 was one of the poorest places he had ever seen. About a quarter of all the arrivals they got at this Corrections Facility yielded from the slums: If it wasn’t District 5, then it was probably District 2 (although District 2 was much better off than District 5, at least in some areas). 

He motioned for the new arrival to leave to the other side of the room, and S E O C H A N G B I N got up. 

Chris quickly fell into a routine: Scan the wrist ID of a new arrival, attempt a tiny bit of conversation to make them feel more at ease, enter the data, and get ready for the next one. 

S K 0 1 4 5 ; G D K I M S E U N G M I N

H H 5 2 3 0 ; A P H W A N G H Y U N J I N 

J Y 0 0 2 1 ; L C Y A N G J E O N G I N

Chris’ eyes snapped open to look at the teen’s face. 

_Yang Jeongin, 17_. Son of Mr. Yang Minseok. This is the heir to an executive position in a LIONS INC. chemical branch, he realized. 

Jeongin flashed him a carefree smile. His father was probably pressured by higher ups to put his son in a Correctional Facility.

Dear God, Chris thought as the youngest arrival so far made his way to the other side of the room, this kid is going to die here.

[ y o u r t i m e r e m a i n i n g i s : **1 9 3 . 6 5** m i n u t e s ]

>> F u n c t i o n : **E n t e r n e w d a t a**

[ P l e a s e s c a n w r i s t I D ]

A new teen shuffled over to the desk where Chris was seated. Curious eyes were darting from side to side, taking in new information.

[ C o n f i r m s c a n : J H 3 1 2 9 ; M S]

**[ c o n f i r m ]** [ d e c l i n e ]

“What’s going to happen to us?” the teen, who had introduced himself as Han Jisung, asked him.

“Is it true that you’re going to brainwash us? I heard that first you drug us out of our minds and then-”

“No, of course not,” Chris interrupted gently, “You’re just here so that you can learn to live peacefully in our society.” He looked down at the chart. Apparently this kid was training to become a mechanic. 

“Well, yes, I guess you could say that, but what I _really_ heard is that-”

“You’re here because you’re different, because you don’t quite fit in with everyone else. That’s OK, people are born different. But we’re gonna work on that, alright? We’ll help fix you, so you can be like everyone else. Don’t you wanna be just like everyone else?”

Jisung remained silent, but Chris saw that he was still filled with questions. That’s alright, Chris thought, I just need to pay a bit more attention to him to ensure he learns how to fit in. Who wouldn’t want to fit in?

Something slithered gracefully into the chair opposite to Chris, and a small wrist extended itself towards him. He looked up.

It was him. The pretty one with the light hair and freckles. 

[ y o u r t i m e r e m a i n i n g i s : **1 8 8 . 4 4** m i n u t e s ]

>> F u n c t i o n : **E n t e r n e w d a t a**

[ P l e a s e s c a n w r i s t I D ]

“What’s your name?”

“Felix.” Chris was surprised at the deep voice, but after the initial shock thought that it quite suited him. 

[ C o n f i r m s c a n : F X 2 9 0 0 ; D E ]

**[ c o n f i r m ]** [ d e c l i n e ]

“And why are you here?”

“I snuck out with some friends after curfew one too many times. They’re in another Facility, I think.” The more Felix talked the more Chris heard an accent he hadn’t in quite a while. It was the familiar nasally twang of District 2 Section 9. It was home.

[ E R R O R : D A T A O N F X 2 9 0 0 ; D E U N A V A I L A B L E ]

Chris frowned and hunched over the scanner. This was strange. He’d never had an error occur before on his shift, although he heard it happened once before. 

“Hey, Woojin!” he called over, in his hurry not noticing how Felix cursed under his breath. 

“That’s strange,” the Correctional Educator muttered, frowning at the red letters.

“Of course it’s strange, Wooj, that’s why I called. Now what do we do with this?”

“I heard this happened before, but I’ve never seen it. I’m gonna call management.” And with that Woojin was off, speeding out the door and down the hallway, leaving Chris confused and in charge of twenty-seven equally confused, antsy teenagers. 

He turned back around to Felix: “Has this ever happened to you?” 

“No, it’s the first time,” the teen answered. “Is it bad?”

Large brown eyes looked straight into Chris’ soul. He felt weak, and ready to believe anything. Heck, if Felix had told him right now that he was in fact Archangel Michelangelo descended from heaven to invite Chris because God wanted to smoke pot with him, he would have believed it in a heartbeat, no questions asked. 

“Of course not. It’s just a small error, I’m sure we can fix this in no time, I promise you.” Felix looked visibly relieved, and Chris continued.

“What are you training to be? I’ve never seen ‘D E’ before.”

“I’m gonna be in the entertainment industry. I know it’s an outdated job and all, but there’s only so much a hologram can do for a crowd.”

Chris nodded. It made sense, he supposed. Holographic and CGI idols were great, they were _perfect_ , for lack of a better word, but he understood why people longed to see real-life idols, dancers, and singers again. It was like trying to replace a loved one with an android copy; it works for a while, makes for a nice illusion, but you keep noticing little things that still aren’t quite human. These little things build up, until over time the android has turned from beloved copy into creepy mechanical impostor. 

“I’m sure you’re very talented.” 

Felix smiles, and Chris’ breath stops. It’s a smile that radiates warmth and unadulterated happiness, and Chris cannot stop staring. 

It’s in this moment Woojin walked back onto the arrival platform, a satisfied smile on his face telling of a job well done: “I talked to management and they said not to worry. It was just a small glitch in the system, and it’s all fixed now. Just scan his wrist again, and it should be fine.”

“Thanks man. I almost died trying to keep twenty-seven misbehaving teenagers in check. How irresponsible of you to just leave me here at their mercy.”

“Ah, I’m sure that you payed a lot of attention to all of them,” Woojin said, side-eyeing Felix, which Chris pointedly ignored. He whipped out the scanner again, and true to Woojin’s word, this time he managed to register Felix with no trouble at all. 

“Sorry for the trouble there, mate,” he petted Felix’s shoulder, letting his District 2 Section 9 accent slip through on purpose. When Felix looked up at him with wide eyes, he smirked and waved him off to the other side of the room so that he could continue registering the five remaining teenagers.


	2. Yongbok

_3 months ago…_

  


The sound of his feet hitting the concrete tore through the night like gunfire. 

The streets were slick and wet with rain; it smelled of smoke and rubbish as Felix rounded a corner. He just needed to get off the main street. He just needed to get to the meeting point. 

Behind him, actual gunfire rattled the otherwise silent city. They were getting closer. 

His lungs were burning as if he was breathing acid, and Felix could feel a distinct pulling pain in his left side. The rain made his otherwise fluffy hair stick to his forehead, and he was pretty sure there were streaks of mascara running down his cheeks, although he would have had a hard time saying if it was from the rain or from the tears of frustration that escaped his eyes.

Fuck fuck fuck! He didn’t want to die!

He rounded another corner and slipped into a dirty alley. A pink neon sign promising “Drinks 24/7” flickered on and off. He could have sworn he’d been here before. 

Shit. He was running in circles, wasn’t he?

His pretty dress shoes now completely ruined as he splashed through a puddle of water and god-knows-what, Felix tried to rack his brain for answers. What was the best way out? How does he get to the meeting point? Where was he even? But the images of city maps his brain produced were far too many. Was he in the Red Lights District? In the E-ware District?

His heart pounded in his chest. He should have studied the maps better. Fuck! He trained for this! Why were his instincts failing him now of all times?!

The alley came to a dead end. Without stopping, Felix jumped and grabbed the top of the dirty wall with his hands, scrambling it up desperately. He heaved himself up and felt the right knee of his dress pants tear, but paid it no mind; they were replaceable. Looking down from the top of the wall, he barely managed to stop himself before jumping down into the gurgling waters of a river that would have surely meant his death by hypothermia. The gunshots behind him and the hammering of his own heart must have been the reason he hadn’t heard the river before. 

Felix looked down. In the darkness the waters looked like black snakes, writhing and curling themselves around anything that dared to jump in. Does he risk it? The opposite side of the river was also framed by a wall, surely slick due to the rain, but maybe if he drifted a little farther he would find somewhere he could exit? The men pursuing him had robotic hounds on his trail, he was almost sure of that, since nearly all hotels and guards employed them these days. The hounds were infra-red sensitive - if he jumped in the river and cooled down enough, maybe it could cover his infra-red signature for a while?

The voices behind him were getting closer. Tailored shoes hit the asphalt of the alley, and the echo carried the voices of the men (Two? Three? He couldn’t tell.) to him, distorted and ugly. The metallic clacks on the pavement told him that his suspicions were true. He turned around.

Illuminated by the light of the main street, two sleek shadows were approaching the wall. They had the statures of Doberman Pinschers, slightly exaggerated no doubt for the hotel’s aesthetic, but the metallic glint of their midnight black coats and the glowing red eyes gave away what the creatures really were. Felix was doomed. 

He looked back down the wall again. If he was lucky… no. He was carrying too much valuable information. Relying on luck is not an option. It wasn’t _good enough_! The beam of a flashlight found his face.

In a desperate attempt to get out of this damn situation, Felix leapt to the side as the first robotic hound jumped at him, causing the snapping jaws of the impostor canine to miss him by a hair’s width. While his hands were gripping onto the rusty metal of a fire escape ladder, Felix heard the tell-tale splash behind him that told him the hound was no longer a problem. 

He pulled himself up onto the fire escape. The men hadn’t caught up with him yet, but the second hound had. A plan was slowly forming in his head. 

If he got up three flights of stairs he would be on the rooftop of the building; While he was running up, he would be mostly covered by the stairs from the shooters on the bottom; The stairs were the kind that had rather large holes in them, meaning that the second robotic hound would have trouble not getting its metal claws stuck. Felix would be invulnerable to the feared bullets, and he could finally shake the second hound off his tail. It was _perfect_. 

To the shouts of the men below him, Felix clamored up the fire escape. He heard three, then four shots, but that was it. He smirked. Of course these men couldn’t risk someone calling the police on their ass, lest they must explain exactly why their precious boss wanted them to chase after a soaked underaged kid at two in the morning. 

He was caught off guard when a door behind him opened, and a young man in pajamas stuck his head outside. 

“I heard gunshots! Do I need to call the police?!”

Felix stopped dead, smirked, and turned around on his heels. _Perfect_.

“Sir, please let me in! They’re chasing me, they have a gun, please call the police!” 

The man waved him in frantically, and closed the door behind him. 

  
Warmth engulfed Felix as soon as he entered the shabby apartment. Another man, also in pajamas and with eyes red from sleepiness, handed him a fluffy white towel to dry off. 

“What are you doing outside at this hour? It’s way past curfew!”

Oh right. This wasn’t the LIONS INC. corporation; they had stricter rules here, including a ten pm. curfew. 

Felix didn’t say anything, instead accepting the towel graciously while being lead to take a seat on a kitchen chair. 

The two men who had let him in introduced themselves, but Felix was too caught up in spinning his heart-wrenching tale of woe to remember their names. One (the evidently younger) was tall and lean, with tan skin, a slight lisp, and big, bambi eyes. The older of the two, who at one point stepped away to make a phone call to the police, was a total contrast of his flatmate by being all soft, smooth edges, and by reacting a lot calmer to the situation. 

Felix did not like lying, but it helped that he was shivering and wet; playing up the ‘traumatized child’ act meant that the two hosts did not ask too many questions when his answers were short or not present at all.

“I don’t mean to intrude,” he started once he had warmed up, “but I think my brother is really worried about me. Can I make a phone call? I need him to know that I’m safe.”

“Of course. The phone is in the hallway, you can help yourself,” the older of the two said, while the younger made a fuss. “Let the kid talk to his brother, Minho, it’s not like he’s going to disappear on us,” he reasoned right before the two heard the click of the door being shut.

Felix walked down the stairwell as quietly as possible. By now the men must have disappeared, and from what he gathered from his two hosts, he was only two blocks away from the meeting point. He opened the front door of the apartment building and strolled outside, intent on staying in the shadows and not attracting any attention to himself, when a large meaty hand grabbed the back of his tuxedo jacket. 

“There ya are, ya little fucker,” a voice growled in his ear, but Felix didn’t waste a second thought on it, instead slipping out of his jacket like a fish and darting down the street towards his destination.

It was still raining, but it seemed the rain had doubled in intensity. It wasn’t raining anymore, no, it was pouring, and within seconds Felix’s sheer white dress shirt was soaked. It was an odd sensation. His hands and feet were hot, but the skin of his chest, thighs, and cheeks felt cold and clammy. Felix raced down the street, hearing the heavy footsteps behind him, until he finally, _finally_ , spotted a black car with its tail lights on parked by the sidewalk. The car had no logo on it, no license plate, nothing to give it away. 

He yanked open the door and slid into the back seat.

“Do you have what we’re here for?” The man on the other side of the car was dressed in an expensive black suit, completely contrasting Felix’s shivering and pathetic frame.

“Yes boss,” he gasped out, trying hard to even out his breath, “Opened his mouth right away, Sir, a real talker.”

“Good. Make sure to write down everything you found and hand in any evidence to Mark when we get back. There’s a change of clothes for you on the passenger seat.”

“Yes Sir, thank you Sir.”

“And Yongbok,” the man leaned down towards Felix, “such mistakes are not to be tolerated. You were meant to be discreet, but instead you endangered your mission and put the integrity of LIONS INC. at risk. This is much bigger than you, and you carry a responsibility towards your employers. There _will_ be repercussions, understand?”

Felix gulped.

“Yes Sir.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> allrighty here's the second chapter! Some guests make a cameo appearance, but aren't really relevant to the story.
> 
> This entire AU was inspired by the music videos for District 9 and Miroh, as well as some theories on tumblr by mvtheories008 :)
> 
> idk this is my first time writing such detailed action scenes, and I know this chapter really is different to the previous one, but asdfghjkl I just wanted to establish some of Felix's character. (and also add to the mystery surrounding who he is huehuehuehue)
> 
> Next chapter we go back to the present (and to Chan), I promise!


	3. No more placebos

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for detailed description of a panic attack

At 07:00 on the dot, all lights in the STR0325 Corrections Facility simultaneously turned on, reflecting off the glaring white walls. 

Chris jerked awake to the blasting noise from the monitor on his bedside table. He sat up, groaning as his eyes attempted to adjust to the brightness emitted by the LED lamps overhead, and across the small room Woojin was rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. Sharing a room with someone else was a privilege that only highly ranked Corrections Facility personnel were granted, and Chris was thankful for it. He would have no doubt gone crazy if it wasn’t for Woojin’s steady presence. 

He stood up and busied himself with changing into his working uniform while Woojin took forever in the bathroom. Chris smoothed his hair down into something resembling a hairstyle and stuck his hand-held monitor in his pocket, then slowly made his way over to the corner of the room, where thirty screens were hung above a long, two-person desk. Three of the screens showed empty rooms, but the remaining twenty-seven were filled with groaning teenagers slowly waking up. Everything seemed to be in order. 

Switching places with Woojin, Chris quickly brushed his teeth and washed his face, letting the cold water chase the remaining sleep from his eyes. By 07:15, the pair marched out of their room and into the long hallway connecting to all rooms, armed with a matching pair of white clipboards and hand-held screens. 

Woojin walked to the end of the hallway, counting down all the kids that had, by now, stepped out of their rooms and lined up by the wall. This was almost the end of their first week here, and they all knew the routine by now. Chris nodded, and the older of the two led the hoard of teenagers out into the cafeteria, while Chris himself brought up the rear. 

Getting everyone seated and fed was always a hassle. Friend groups had begun to form, fall apart, and reform again, and one’s seating position mattered in this strange and new facility. The Corrections Officer and Correctional Educator sat in the corner, side-by-side, so that they had a good view of the entire cafeteria. With hungry abandon, Chris tore into the scrambled eggs on his tray. The sleeping pills always made him ravenous in the morning. 

“So what are the kids getting today, Wooj?” Chris asked through a mouthful of egg. Today was the first day the teenagers would be receiving medication, real medication, to help them be more receptive towards the lessons they were taught. Of course, the teens wouldn’t be the wiser, since they had been getting daily wrist injections from the day they first arrived. Only, up until this point the worst thing that those injections contained was extra glucose; today was the day the placebos were replaced with actual medicine. 

“ C S 5 7 2 1, Changbin, he needs extra antidepressants, I’m gonna give him Sertraline; his serotonin levels are steadily declining and we don’t need him shutting down on us,” Woojin answered, whipping out his monitor and bringing up a chart. “The rest of the kids are pretty much standard, though we also need to give H H 5 2 3 0 some form of mood stabilizer on top of the usual. He’s been reacting violently and lashing out irregularly. Oh, and the young one, J Y 0 0 2 1, I’m gonna give him something to focus better, he’s been all over the place really. I’m thinking Ritalin?”

Chris nodded along. 

“What about Felix?” 

Woojin looked at him inquisitively. 

“The redhead.”

“Ah, F X 2 9 0 0 !”, the older of the two scrolled down on his monitor until he found what he was looking for. “No, he just gets the normal dose. Teachers didn’t report any behaviour that needs to be corrected. At least nothing we can correct chemically. Why do you ask? Did you notice something?” Woojin cast the other a knowing look.

“No… just wondering,” although Chris tried to be nonchalant about it, he couldn’t stop his hands from fidgeting with the sides of his tray. “Isn’t it time to go anyway?”

True to his inner clock, the bell signalled the end of the breakfast period. 

07:45, and all the teenagers were once again lined up at the wall, facing the exit of the cafeteria. Chris, flanked by the ever-vigilant Woojin, set up the small station while Woojin went over his notes. The first student approached Chris, and the Corrections Officer held a device up to the teen’s left wrist, right above the wrist ID.

The device drew a small bit of blood from the teen’s wrist for analysis while simultaneously injecting him with a cocktail of mood suppressants, rohypnol 348-Ω, and a long list of other medications that Chris could never fully remember, no matter how hard he tried.  


* * *

Felix felt strange. He was dizzy, queasy to his stomach, and felt like he was constantly falling. His heart was pounding, and he broke out into a cold sweat. His hands were tingling strangely.

Pulling the sleeves of the white uniform hoodie over his sore wrists, he looked around the classroom. They were all seated facing the wall and with their back towards the center of the room, at tiny cubicle-like desks, with a monitor in front of them. In the center of the room was their Correctional Educator... Woojin was his name, Felix remembered after racking his brain for a while. 

This scared him. He had always prided himself on his quick, photographic memory; it was a key asset of his, and now that he could physically _feel_ his brain slowing down, what use was he ever going to be?

Felix looked around the room. Next to him Hyunjin, the boy he had recently made acquaintance with (they weren’t close enough for ‘friends’ yet) because of a shared dance class, was sitting still and looking strangely sleepy while clicking away on his screen. To Felix’s left, Jeongin looked more focused than ever, as if the world would end if he took his eyes off of the task in front of him. 

A pale face popped out of one of the cubicles two seats over to stare at him. It was Jisung, who was looking a little green around the nose, too. He mouthed something to Felix, but the dizziness that gnawed on the edges of the redhead’s vision was too distracting to make out the words. 

As if on cue, the Correctional Educator reprimanded them with a softly spoken “Back to work guys, let’s focus on our task please.”

Felix turned back around. His brain felt foggy and slow, as if every thought was the equivalent of wading through mud, and he hated the fact that he couldn’t _think_.

Was he going to be like this for the rest of his life? No, that couldn’t be! His palms were sweating, he could feel drops cascading down his back. He couldn’t lose his job, he was gonna end up being a factory worker somewhere, wasn’t he, that’s all that his slow brain was good for now, sorting boxes and pulling levers. 

The room suddenly felt too small, the white was too bright and glaring, it was all too much. Warm, so warm, so stifling, fuck, he was gonna die wasn’t he?

His chest clenched and his heart started racing. It felt as if he was falling, the edges of his vision blurring and black zigzagging across his line of sight, he couldn’t see clearly.

Oh no no no no no, he’s having a heart attack, shit, he can’t breathe, what is wrong with his _stupid lungs_ why wouldn’t they breathe, he was gonna drown, he was gonna drown and suffocate and _die_ and his head was already swimming and he couldn’t fucking breathe and he needed more air and he couldn’t breathe and it was too hot and he needed to go outside and clear his mind but he was still drowning and he was going to **die** because of his _stupid fucking lungs_ and he couldn’t fucking _breathe_ and-

_“F X 2 9 0 0 ? Felix? Felix!”_

His head registered the noise as if through a fog, and there were hands on his shoulders, but that wasn’t important right now, he needed to breathe deeper, he was still drowning, he needed more air- 

_“Chris, I need you in training room 216. Felix, listen to me. It’s all right, just take deep breaths.”_

The voice was soft, smooth, calm.

_“Hey, listen to me. It’s OK, it’s all gonna be OK. Felix? Can you hear me? Listen to me.”_

There were hands on his back, on his shoulders, no, he didn’t have time for this right now, how could he do his job if he was so busy _breathing_? He tried to brush off the hands that were touching him; no, stop, that isn’t _allowed,_ he didn’t want-

_“Hey Woojin what’s wrong? I came as soon as I-”_

_“Help me out here Chris, I don’t want to sedate him unless I have to.”_

Hands caught his shoulders, and he felt himself being turned around. 

“Hey, no, it’s alright, I got you, I got you. It’s gonna be fine.”

Felix slowly registered a gasping noise, and it took another few seconds to realize this was him. He was gasping like a stranded fish, his chest heaving up and down; his ribs hurt but he couldn’t stop-

His frantic eyes found a face, but the black dots in his vision prevented him from seeing who the face belonged to. 

“Close your eyes. Deep breaths, alright? Deep breaths.”

He nodded and did as he was told. The painful whiteness of the room stopped assaulting his eyes and he felt as if he’d taken a breath of fresh air... Vaguely aware that someone was counting for him, he tried to slow down his breathing, slow down his thoughts, until clarity finally trickled through the muddy haze that was his mind. He was fine, he wasn’t dying, he was fine... 

Someone gently placed a steady hand on his shoulder. 

“Hey, hey Felix, you with me?”

Felix looked up. The owner of the voice and the hand was the Corrections Officer, Chris. As his chest expanded less and less frequently, he could also make out the rest of the room. He was still in the classroom, he realized, with Woojin hovering worriedly close-by, and the rest of the students having turned around in their chairs to look at him. 

“Yeah,” he croaked, his throat feeling dry and in desperate need of some water. 

“Alright, let’s get you somewhere where you can lie down for a while, OK?” Chris said, while gently helping the younger boy up. To Woojin he continued: “I’m gonna take him to my office, away from people, so he can rest. I’ll try and find out what caused this.”

“No worries, Chris, I’ll stay here with the kids and make sure everything runs smoothly. We’ll talk over the monitor later.”

Felix felt himself being guided out of the classroom and down a hallway. He felt shaky, like he couldn’t quite keep his balance, and on the verge of tears. He tried to remember the path to the office, but the wetness of his eyes made it hard to see. Next thing he knew, he was pulled down to sit on a bed. 

The Corrections Officer - _Chris_ \- pulled up a chair from the white desk that was right by the bed, and sat in it, facing Felix. 

“I’m gonna take your pulse and temperature now, OK?” he pulled out a hand-held device and pressed it to the younger’s wrist. “You’re not allergic to anything, are you?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Felix answered with a shaky voice, tears still threatening to spill. God, he just wanted the Corrections Officer out of the room so that he could have a fucking cry. 

Chris hummed. 

“How do you feel? Rather, how _did_ you feel before, in the classroom?”

“Shaky, I guess, I don’t know... My head is woozy, I can feel my thoughts slowing down. It’s like I can’t think, there’s just, like, _noise_ inside my head.”

“But you’re not hearing voices, are you?” the elder looked Felix directly in the eye. 

“No, no, it’s just… everything is just so _slow_ ,” he gestured helplessly with his hands, but soon dropped them back on the bed in favor of conserving precious energy; his arms felt tired and tingly, and his whole body felt ready to just collapse and hit the pillows. 

The device beeped and the older removed it, humming in acknowledgement. 

“You don’t have a fever, that’s great! Good news; this was probably just a panic attack, Felix, so there really isn’t anything to be worried about. You feeling dizzy and slow is just a normal reaction.”

Felix nodded, smiling gratefully, before reaching for the dustbin under the table and emptying his breakfast into it. 

“Ah... that’s a normal reaction, too,” Chris patted his back awkwardly once the other was finished, handing Felix a glass of water he had magically procured from somewhere. Felix gulped down the water. It felt heavenly in his throat, and his head felt a lot lighter, as if the slightly below room temperature water slowly washed the fogginess out of his mind.

Chris fluffed up the pillow and unfolded the white blanket at the end of the bed: “Get some rest now, it’s the best you can do. I’ll excuse you from your classes for the rest of the day.”

As the tiredness took over his brain, Felix barely registered kicking off his shoes and pulling the blanket up to his chin before drifting off to sleep, still feeling frail and a little shaky from the events of the morning. 

  
* * *

Chris watched silently as the younger got to sleep. It wasn’t something he hadn’t dealt with before; the required medications roster was a little harsh on some kids, though the medications causing a panic attack wasn’t commonplace. He did have someone, two years ago, that ended up having a panic attack because the medication made them lose feeling in their fingertips.

He sighed. As long as no one was hallucinating or downright turning manic, they were fine. They just needed time to adjust a little. He pulled his monitor out of his pocket.

[ I n c o m i n g m e s s a g e f r o m : **W K 3 9 8 3 ; C E** ]

>> _u p d a t e m e o n t h e s i t u a t i o n w h e n y o u h a v e t i m e , o k ?_

With another glance at Felix, who was by now soundly asleep, Chris began to type. 

_I t w a s j u s t a p a n i c a t t a c k . H e s a i d h e c o u l d f e e l_ _h i s_

 _b r a i n s l o w i n g d o w n ,_ _a n d p a n i c k e d b e c a u s e o f i t_ <<

_H i s b o d y j u s t n e e d s t o g e t u s e d t o t h e m e d i c a t i o n ,_

_ >> t h e n h e ’ l l b e f i n e _

_I h o p e s o . A r e t h e r e s t o f t h e k i d s f i n e ?_ <<

_M o s t l y , y e s . J H 3 1 2 9 s a i d h e f e l t a l i t t l e s i c k e a r l i e r ,_

_a n d H H 5 2 3 0 w a s c o m p l a i n i n g_ _a b o u t a h e a d a c h e ._

 _ >> I _ _t o l d t h e m i t w a s b e c a u s e o f s t r e s s_

_W e s h o u l d g i v e e v e r y o n e t h e r e s t o f t h e d a y_

_o f f s o t h e y c a n r e s t_ <<

_Y e s t h a t ’ s p r o b a b l y t h e b e s t i d e a , w e d o n ’ t_

_ >> n e e d a n o t h e r s i t u a t i o n o n o u r h a n d s _

_Y e p . W e ’ l l c o m e b y a t r o l l c a l l w i t h d i n n e r_ <<

Chris could practically hear the sigh in the words Woojin texted him next:

>> _I w i s h i t w a s n ’ t l i k e t h i s_

_S a m e . W e c a n ’ t d o a n y t h i n g , t h o u g h ._

_Y o u k n o w i t ’ s n e c e s s a r y_ <<

>> _L e t s t a k e i t e a s y o n t h e n e w a r r i v a l s f o r t h e n e x t f e w d a y s_

He couldn’t agree more. It was always tough seeing the kids struggle through their first few rounds of medication, but management had made it crystal clear to Chris that taking anyone off their mandatory meds (unless absolutely necessary, of course) would not be tolerated. He would lose his job, if not worse. Chris still remembered how, two years ago, one of their new arrivals ended up having an allergic reaction to one of the drugs, and it almost killed him. He recalled pacing in the hospital wing, shouting at nurses that insisted they had to ask for written permission from management before the kid could be put on a new drug regimen, all while their patient's airways were slowly closing up. It pissed him off so much, he had been ready to tear off someone’s head. 

With one last look at Felix sleeping in the office bed, Chris stood up from the chair, refilled the glass of water on the bedside table, and stepped out, locking the door behind him. For the first time in a long, long time, he caught himself really thinking about the Correctional Facility.

Was this right? He hated these aspects of his job. These kids, half of them never did anything criminal in their entire life. Was he really improving their lives? He clutched his head as he walked briskly down the long corridor towards his room. This couldn't be right, could it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Phew that was so fukin long. Over 2800 words in a chapter, i'm screaming. 
> 
> The story is slowly unraveling huehuehue ~
> 
> A couple of things: Everyone's panic attacks are different, and different things can cause panic attacks depending on the person. Also, ritalin is often used as a study/focus drug, and it's side effects line up most with the symptoms described in SKZ's Side Effects music video.   
> Rohypnol is a date-rape drug that renders you basically unable to say no/have free will, and idk I headcannoned (?) that in this dystopian au maybe the government achieved a new synthesis of this drug (rohypnol 348-Ω) that could be used to fight the 'dangerous' thoughts some of its more rebellious citizens were getting... 
> 
> In the next chapter I wanna focus more on Chris and his coming to terms with the fact that LIONS INC. and the rest of the government fuckin s u c k s.
> 
> Thank you all for your kind comments, each one made me really happy and gave me an extra bit of motivation to write more ~<3 J


	4. Expected Behavior

“So you know like, Seven Docks?”

“Yeah yeah yeah!”

“We used to hang out ‘round there a lot, ‘cause you could like, watch the ships arrive and stuff.”

“Oh yeah, we used to go to… uh… was it- was it Cronulla? Cronulla shore.”

“Oh I remember that! They had like, those big black rocks there, right?”

“Yeah that’s the place.”

Felix giggled. He and Chris were sitting in the small dance studio the Correctional Facility had to offer, with their backs to the large mirror, exchanging stories about their childhood in District 2 Section 9. He’d been feeling a lot better these last three days, even though he spent almost three days before that in the hospital wing. 

“Where abouts did you live, then?” 

“In Blacktown. By the Hills, like on the West side,” Felix’s hands gestured towards the left as he was visualizing a map of his home, “it’s got the typical… the typical… docks and storehouses and stuff.”

“Ah man, I lived by the Acres, in Town Hall.” Chris leaned his head back until it hit the cool surface of the mirror. “We used to go searching for shellfish on Manley Cliff, ‘cause it was always nice and windy during the day.”

Section 9 was famous among District 2 for being a fishing section. Felix recalled the large lake, dubbed by locals “The Big Blue”, and the small fishing towns and settlements that were set up around it. District 2, being a more mountainous region than the rest of the Districts in LIONS INC., was generally less developed in terms of infrastructure, but Section 9, in a valley which formed the lowest point of District 2, was the most crucial area. The lake provided locals and about a third of all of LIONS INC. with fresh fish and seafood. 

“Oh yeah Manley! Manley Cliff is good… My dad had like this tiny little fishing boat, right? We’d always sail out to Manley Cliff to catch Largemouth Bass from the shallower parts.”

“Yeah I remember going to the smaller beaches to fish? ‘Cause the water was shallow but the fish were like, _really_ big.” Chris spread his hands apart to showcase how big the fish got. 

“Hmm,” Felix hummed in agreement. “What do you miss most about Section 9, though?”

“Ahh, the water… Or maybe like, the smell… you know what I mean?”

“Oh yeah! The smell of the boats when they arrived, or the docks and stuff, yeah that was my favorite.”

“That smell when it’s like, thirty degrees, but the wood on the docks is still wet.”

The younger sighed. The air in his hometown always smelled tangy, like fish innards and seaweed, and everyone was always sunburnt and barefoot. He’d never realized, until he moved to the center of LIONS INC. to start his training, that streets actually _weren’t_ supposed to be a river of mud when it rained, or that there was such a thing as a roof not made out of a patchwork of rusted metal sheets. 

“You know the place with the pool table and the TV? I used to go there all the time.” Chris turned his head in the younger’s direction. 

“When you go down the… down the old stairs?”

“Yeah yeah, that’s the one!”

“Ah, that’s so funny, ‘cause my friends and I, we always wanted to hang out there but everyone was like, so much older than us and we were always really scared to,” Felix laughed. 

A comfortable silence settled over the two as both were lost in nostalgic feelings for their home District, until Felix clasped his hands together and stood up. 

“Wanna see me dance?” he asked, his bright sunshine smile temporarily causing Chris to forget how to breathe. The older nodded, and Felix went over to the stereo. 

* * *

The beeping of his monitor signalled the end of this block of classes, and Chris reluctantly moved to stand up. He didn’t know how much time he had spent sitting on the wooden floor, watching Felix dance his heart out and grow sweaty and tired, but glow more and more the longer he moved to the rhythm. At some point during the class Felix was too exhausted to move, so he collapsed on the floor and the two of them spent the rest of the hour just listening to the playlist of songs. 

Chris had forgotten how great music was. He couldn’t even remember the last time he had _heard_ music, up until now. Music, unless part of a class, wasn’t something that the Correctional Facility encouraged. Sure, LIONS INC. had their fair share of music labels, but music was a part of life in society, while being admitted to a Correctional Facility was neither a life, nor bore any resemblance to an actual society.

God, his fingers itched to touch a keyboard again, maybe even a laptop, his ears felt strangely cold with the absence of the headphones he used to wear so often before his training period began… 

Ushering a tired but ecstatic Felix out of the small dance room and into the next classroom two halls down, Chris made a mental checklist of the things he still had to do. He’d wasted an hour with the younger in the dance studio and now he had to hurry up to his office so he could enter the data he took after today’s breakfast. 

He opened the classroom door to hand the young dancer over to Woojin, who would be running a class on LIONS INC. Ethics in just over five minutes. Chris flashed his co-worker a smile and, with a small wave to Felix, closed the door again. 

The hallway, all white tiles and buzzing LED lights, suddenly felt cold and utterly dreary as his footsteps echoed off the plain walls. White, white, nothing but white… it was enough to drive someone mad, although he was puzzled as to why exactly it was driving him mad now. Living in the Facility for over two years, he really ought to have gotten used to all this bleakness. 

He jogged up the steps to his office, taking two at a time, and burst through the key-card locked door. He had no time to waste. Chris sat down at his desk and quickly started his computer, while piling the needed things on the desk next to him: the device he had used this morning to administer the required medication, a pencil, and a notebook. As the database opened on the screen in front of him, he connected the device to it. 

[ P l e a s e e n t e r s t u d e n t m e d i c a l i n f o r m a t i o n ]

[ e n t e r a u t o m a t i c a l l y ] **[ e n t e r m a n u a l l y ]**

After selecting the manual option, he turned to the device in his hand, accessing the medical records inside. Grabbing the pencil next to him, as well as the notebook, Chris noted down the blood sugar levels, hormonal makeup, nutritional facts, and other data that he had recorded from each of the twenty-seven teenagers this morning, until each box in the table he had created in his notebook was fully filled out. Each box except for one row. 

Felix.

The Corrections Officer flipped back in the notebook to the records of data he took yesterday, noted the numbers next to Felix’s wrist ID, and began writing slightly different ones into today’s table. Hmm, maybe Felix’s blood sugar levels could rise a bit; maybe more serotonin, since he’d recorded a lower number yesterday... 

It was a delicate balancing act: At the end of the week, Felix’s medical record had to stay average, _exactly_ average. Any deviation from the norm would cause Woojin to pay closer attention to him, maybe even prescribe him additional medicine, and then Chris would _have_ to inject Felix again, and at that point it would be too fucking obvious that the freckled teen had not been receiving more than an extra shot of glucose every morning for the past five days. The Corrections Officer would lose his job and probably his freedom, and worse; Felix would be on that horrible medication again. 

[ P l e a s e e n a b l e m a n u a l e n t e r i n g o f m e d i c a l i n f o r m a t i o n ]

Chris raised his wrist ID to the scanner. 

>> **C B 2 9 9 7 ; C O**

>> *** * * * * * * * ***

[ A c c e s s g r a n t e d ]

>> **i n p u t d a t a : C S 5 7 2 1 ; S T**

He methodically worked his way through his table, copying the numbers from his notebook into the program on the computer screen. It was long and tedious, but everything beat the alternative. Chris shuddered. At first he had hoped that the drowsiness and heavy head that Felix was complaining about would fade quickly as his body got used to the regular dose of medication, but the younger was just _not getting better_ , no matter how long Chris waited. Until eventually he couldn’t physically wait any longer; until he secretly swapped the younger’s medicinal dosage back to the placebo.

Chris was glad he did what he did. He had no regrets. While the rest of the still relatively new arrivals were getting duller and duller each day, their eyes glazing over and their imagination dimming, Felix shone on like a bright beam of starlight. The freckled boy still retained his passion, his emotions; he still talked about his ambitions and dreams with friends and classmates and sometimes, to Chris’ great delight, even with the Corrections Officer. 

And Chris? Chris would give anything, anything to make sure that this smile, this attitude, this _Felix_ never, ever dimmed. It was against the rules, he fucking knew that! But the rules, the guidelines, the ‘expected behavior’... it was all making less and less sense now. Felix looked so alive, made _him_ feel so alive… 

**[ save ]**

[ E x i t i n g s y s t e m ]

[ D a t a i n p u t o n **2 7** s t u d e n t s c o m p l e t e ]

He shut down the computer and stored the notebook back in the desk’s drawer, under five other notebooks filled with lesson notes and observations, where it certainly would not be found by accident. It was almost lunch time. 

Feeling lighter than before, and certainly a lot happier, Chris left his office in favor of finding Woojin’s classroom, so that he and the Correctional Education could soon chaperone twenty seven hangry teenagers to the cafeteria. 

Twenty six teenagers, drugged out of their brains; and Felix.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sooooooo! Felix is off medication, because Chan is a whipped man!
> 
> I modelled the conversation between them in the beginning after the episode of Two Kids Room where they both just talked about australia... if you noticed, some of the names of locations i used are adapted from that conversation, too. Please excuse me while i do some more world-building huehuehuehue~
> 
> new chapter, new challenge! this time the challenging part for me was to keep the conversation flowing and make it seem like an actual conversation. Anyhoots, see y'all soon, and thanks for reading!


	5. LIONS Hovercar X300

Jisung blinked against the harsh lights of the ceiling. Wasn’t anybody else blinded? It was so heckin’ bright, he was gonna get a headache. Or, he would get one, if he didn’t have one already. Double headache. 

Mumbling to himself, he ducked back down to his workstation and focused -tried to focus- on his task. It was something he had done a dozen, a million times before, and would probably do a million times more in his life. 

It wasn’t a bad job, he mulled, it wasn’t half bad; install new circuits, personalize some rich fart’s car motor so that it makes the most noise possible, fix up faulty hover trains that were too expensive to replace... it wasn’t bad. Just not terribly exciting. No, Jisung longed for something else, something different. He didn’t even know what it was, though the idea itself was sitting on his tongue.

He shook his head, making himself dizzy in the process. This was only going to get him into trouble. These ideas, this longing, this was _exactly_ what landed him here in the first place. 

He had started building motors and modifying circuits that were not part of his training curriculum, out of sheer boredom, and he’d gotten reprimanded for it. So he began sneaking out, exploring the area around the training center, hoarding spare parts under his cot (They looked neat and could be used again, and it would have been a shame to leave them to rust, okay?). Jisung sighed at the memory. That had been stupid. He should have hidden the parts better, then he wouldn’t have gotten caught by his teachers...

And now he was here. Oh joy of joys! What a _great_ place to be! The only way this could have gone better was if he’d actually been sent to prison. Not that this was much different, he smirked.

Jisung looked back down at the motor in front of him. Alright, he cheered himself on, time to dive back into the machinery and get his hands dirty. The instructions displayed on the screen next to his workstation were long forgotten. There were _much_ easier ways to assemble the engine of a LIONS Hovercar X300! The trick was to assemble it the exact way you would disable it and take it apart, only, you know, backwards. And the large magnet has to be jump-started first. Those paranoid idiots just didn’t want you to know how to disable a car engine. God forbid you know something that could be deemed a danger to their precious elite!

He wiped his nose with his hands, huffing as he got grease on his face. He felt foggy; it was hard to remember the steps to take an engine apart now, and even harder to remember them backwards. He flinched and almost dropped the part he was holding when a hand was placed on his shoulder.

“If you’re struggling to remember,” the voice of the Class Supervisor dripped in faux concern, “you can always look at the steps on your screen again.”

Jisung nodded, just to get the man to step away and move on, but internally he was boiling. That’s what these people wanted, wasn’t it? That he just follows the rules and doesn’t think.

He knew they were drugging him. He’d known from the start, but actually forming that thought, that neural connection, was becoming harder and harder with every day he spent here. Thinking was so _hard_ . Jisung wanted nothing more than to turn his brain off, to flip that metaphorical switch and just function on autopilot for the rest of the day... for the rest of his life. His brain was a fucking mess if he’d ever seen one.   


Glancing over to the work station next to his, he saw that his neighbor (whose name he had forgotten) was more than halfway done. With a long-suffering sigh Jisung turned towards the instructions on the screen. Better get started with this load of nonsense then.

*** * ***

To be honest, Changbin was feeling a lot better lately than he had in a while. Sure, his thoughts were slow and a little hazy, as if blurry around the edges, but at least he was getting up in the morning. Really, he hadn’t felt so capable of waking up and eating and doing and _living_ in what seemed like forever! Life seemed, despite all the headache-inducing white surrounding him, a little easier.

He shifted around in his bed. Changbin isn’t stupid. He knows that whatever is in those needles that enter his wrist every morning is both making him fuzzy and happy. It was hard, at first. The daily injection into his left wrist left behind an itchy, irritating spot. Even though it was a small enough wound that it never bled and healed almost immediately, it still itched like a mosquito bite. Made him want to scratch so bad.

But he promised himself that he wouldn’t. His teen years were behind him, and he’d be damned if one year in a Correctional Facility set him back to his old ways. Changbin was confident enough in himself to say that he had worked his ass off to beat the voices in his head. No way he was gonna let them come back!

Whatever they were giving him was certainly helping. It stopped the downwards spiral he found himself in as soon as he arrived here, and he swore he would make the best of it. He gripped his blanket tighter in determination. The lights would soon shut off throughout the entire Facility, he would go to sleep, and start tomorrow with a clear head. 

Changbin felt his gaze drawn up to his upper right, to the camera that was planted in the ceiling. He’d always had a keen eye for cameras; where they were located, how much they saw, what model they were... it was because of this that he had been able to hack into the security server at his training station a grand total of thirteen times before getting caught.

At first it was just to see if he could. The simple curiosity that drove him to risk his head trying to beat the security system was the result of a sudden manic phase he found himself in (after a particularly intense boxing match with his inner demons). The second time he illegally entered the training center’s security web was to access his own files and student records; the third time was to access his friend’s records. The fourth time was because he had gotten curious about the other information stored there: what were the teachers making note of? What were the lesson objectives? What were teachers doing with their salary?

Changbin smiled at the memory. The fifth time he illegally breached the server was because he had finally found his reason to live, his mission in life: to understand What The Fuck was going on in LIONS INC. By the time he got caught (and only because his roommate, that fucking snitch, had reported his nightly disappearances) the scratch marks on his forearms had faded into obscurity and the inner voices had grown silent.

Just his luck, then, to be sent here. 

Though it wasn’t bad. The fuzziness, this he could deal with. And if his classes were boring and absolutely mind numbing, then he could just stop thinking about the task and put his mind to something else, letting his hands do the work. The people here were nice... the other teens on his floor, in the rooms adjacent to his, they were funny and kind. To his left lived someone called Seungmin, and to his right was this bright kid called Felix. Changbin liked Felix, liked his happy and excited presence.

Seungmin wasn’t bad either, even if Changbin refrained from talking to him at first. Seungmin had a zero and a one in the front of his wrist ID, he was almost elite, and thus a world away from someone like Changbin. Allegedly (or so Changbin heard) he had gotten into a scuffle with another District 5 boy, Hyunjin. 

He scoffed. That sounded stupid. Changbin was not a kid, he understood that some people were born with a silver spoon in their mouth and others with, well, food stamps. He couldn’t blame anyone for having one or two zeroes on their wrist, but at the same time, he couldn’t really help being bitter. Growing up, he used to protect the precious food stamps from the neighborhood bullies with his life. Oh, Changbin remembered the flashy bright hover trains that zipped past his District, only stopping once or twice at a choice few stations. He had never been able to afford a hover train ride, not even a regular train ride, while someone like Seungmin probably rode one every week. Someone like Minho was probably too good for trains, and Jeongin’s chauffeur probably locked the doors of his private hover car whenever they passed by Changbin’s District. 

No. Trains were not his world. He didn’t understand them, didn’t like the metallic zipping noise they made as they zoomed along the magnetic tracks, _hated_ the fact that if he wanted to buy a hover train ticket the person behind the counter would probably assume that he’d stolen the money to pay for the ride. 

The lights went out, and Changbin’s world was drenched in pitch black. Only the faint light of the camera to his upper right was still on, blinking red and evenly. This, the teen thought, _this_ was his world. Cameras were easy, familiar, they were everywhere; in every household, on every street corner, in every building. The cameras in his District, of course, were largely old, faulty, and turned off, since nobody had the resources to watch a bunch of poor people struggle to fucking survive. 

His brain still weirdly blank around the edges, Changbin yawned. Time to go to sleep, he supposed. After all, what more could he do? His daily routine was set, an endless cycle of get up, eat, fill your brain with trash, eat, go to sleep again. The camera in the corner blinked again. Changbin wondered who was watching him, and if anybody was watching him at all. Good luck seeing anything, you clueless fucks, he thought as he closed his eyes. 

Good luck trying to see more of me than I see of you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YEEHAW i'm back with an update! I wrote the majority of this on a 3-hour train ride on my phone, cause i was bored, and just had to edit a bit to make it into a chapter. 
> 
> LOTS of exposition here, huehuehue, more world building! And surprise: Characters that ARENT bang chan or felix!
> 
> I really thought that it was time to introduce some new perspectives to this story, although it is still very heavily focused on felix and chris. 
> 
> This is kind of a break in the story... I'm not really continuing with the plot here, am I? smh. BUT! i felt this was very necessary, since i haven't told you much about the other skz members in this au yet. 
> 
> This chapter's challenge for me? finding unique character voices for Changbin and Jisung. Let me know if I succeeded~
> 
> Also thank you everyone for your kind comments, they always cheer me on. Be back soon, and thanks for reading!


	6. Red

[ N e w M e s s a g e ]

[ D e a r C B 2 9 9 7 ; C O ,

I t h a s c o m e t o o u r a t t e n t i o n t h a t y o u s e e m t o b e s t r u g g l i n g w i t h y o u r 

C o r r e c t i o n s O f f i c e r r e s p o n s i b i l i t i e s r e g a r d i n g i n m a t e F X 2 9 0 0 ; D E . 

W e m u s t r e m i n d y o u t h a t b e s t o w i n g u n n e c e s s a r y a t t e n t i o n u p o n a n i n m a t e u n l e s s 

a b s o l u t e l y n e c e s s a r y i s n o t e t h i c a l b e h a v i o u r f o r a L I O N S I N C . e m p l o y e e . 

W e u r g e y o u t o r e t u r n t o p r o p e r c o n d u c t f o r t h e s a k e o f y o u r i n t e g r i t y a n d 

t o a i d i n t h e r e c o v e r y o f i n m a t e F X 2 9 0 0 ; D E . I f y o u s t i l l f i n d y o u r s e l f s t r u g g l i n g w i t h 

u n o r t h o d o x b e h a v i o u r , m a n a g e m e n t c an p r o v i d e y o u w i t h p r o p e r 

m e d i c a t i o n t o c o n t r o l y o u r u r g e s . ]

Chris frowned at the message on his monitor. What did they mean with ‘bestowing unnecessary attention’?! Although, really, he should have known that this would happen. He spent the most amount of time possible with Felix, voluntarily taking over lessons or mandatory activities the freckled boy was in, and rearranging his own schedule to find any excuse to talk to the younger one on one. Their conversations had become something special for Chris; a time when he could forget about his job, forget about time, guidelines and rules; moments just for him and Felix. 

And now management sent him this. Whatever this was meant to be.

Chris couldn’t quite believe it. It made sense, in that bizarrely bland and white part of his mind, the part that was still convinced that he should be following the rules set out for him. But the rest of his brain rejected the thought. He was not going to self-medicate, and he was not going to give up on Felix!

He reread the message for the third time, his mind flashing red at the use of ‘inmate’ to describe the freckled teen. It made the younger sound like a lunatic, like a patient, like a _thing_ to be _fixed_ , and Chris, who had never felt at ease with using such terminology to describe any of the Correctional Facility arrivals, reeled back at the sight of those letters. No, Felix was not a _thing_ , he was not an _inmate_ ; he was his friend, his confidant, his sunrise in an otherwise dark world lit only by fluorescent white LED lights. Chris was _not_ gonna give up on Felix.

With a sigh, the Corrections Officer closed the message on his monitor and slipped the device back into the pockets of his white uniform. He heaved himself out of his office chair and grabbed the spare key to his room just in case he and Woojin had to monitor separate groups today. It was 19:55, almost time for him to supervise his group as they headed to their area of Voluntary labour today.

Voluntary labour was an ingenious idea introduced by management in order to cut down on staff and employment fees: The arrivals were sorted in groups and, from 20:00 to 21:30, performed various maintenance tasks around the Facility, like mopping the halls, doing laundry, or sorting uniforms. Today Chris was supposed to supervise a group of seven as they tended to the Facility gardens that were used to grow some of the food required. 

He briskly walked down the hallway and outside the main compound, crossing the parking lot where the busses that brought arrivals to the facility were stationed, and heading to the back of one of the smaller compounds, where the garden was. It was dark outside, as all external lights were shut down at 18:00 precisely, leaving only a choice few floodlights to illuminate the parking lot and garden. 

The garden itself was behind the maintenance compound, where the laundry was done, the heavier machinery was stored, and where classes that required larger areas were held. Coincidentally, Woojin was just a little ahead of him, already leading his own group of seven into the laundry room, but Chris refrained from talking to his coworker. Instead, he rounded the last corner and came face to face with his last group of the day. 

He let his eyes wander over the seven faces: The three elite kids -Minho, Jeongin, and Seungmin- were here, as well as the two District 5 boys -Changbin and Hyunjin- and the nosy mechanic boy, Jisung. And of course, Chris noticed with delight, also his favorite arrival Felix, who flashed the older a bright grin upon eye contact and raised his ~~tiny, adorable~~ hand in a small wave. Chris clasped his hands together as seven pairs of eyes all settled on him.

“Alright, everyone, let’s get to work! I want to be done before nine-thirty, so let’s all do a good and thorough job!”

With that he took out his monitor and watched as the seven arrivals fanned out throughout the garden, picking up the tools that they each needed. Chris nodded, satisfied with the ease with which the teens all followed direction.

*** * ***

Working in the garden was boring. Not that the rest of the time he’d spent at the Facility was any more intellectually stimulating, but out of all activities Felix was forced to do here, Voluntary Labour was the worst. The minutes seemed to stretch into hours as Felix made his way through the plants. He was sure that he remembered plants being green, but after three months of only seeing the garden -the sole remotely colorful part of this facility- under the harsh floodlights that rendered it gray rather than green, the freckled boy was beginning to question whether he was going crazy.

His eyes began darting around the garden, searching for the only not-dull thing in this maze of white and gray: Chris. He liked Chris, a lot more than he should, really. The older boy was nice, always ready for a talk about District 2 or literally anything else, and always listened to the younger. It had been a while since anybody ever listened to Felix about _Felix things_. He couldn’t remember the last person, besides Chris of course, who ever asked him about his favorite food. His mother, probably.

It made him realize how much he missed being his own person, how much he missed existing, how much he hated this persona that he had become for his job. Yongbok was someone Felix neither loved nor hated, but rather wanted to avoid, even if there were still parts of him that were undeniably Yongbok... Who was he even? What’s the reason for his whole existence? Perhaps his true self was a merger of Felix and Yongbok, an absurd chimera of smiling small town fisher’s boy Felix, and unattainable otherworldly socialite Lee Yongbok.

Although by all means, Lee Yongbok should not exist. If anyone was to search up Y L 0 0 4 6 ; D E they would find nothing, they would find less than nothing; a ghost. While most people at LIONS INC. only ever remembered the process of getting their career initials added to their wrist ID, Felix could recollect a total of five times that he had had his entire wrist ID erased and replaced with another one, always switching between the IDs of Felix and Yongbok.

Once again he glanced around, startled out of his thoughts by someone (Jisung, probably) dropping a tool onto the cement with a loud clang. Chris was still nowhere to be seen. Where could he be?

Felix was just about to return to his work, assuming that Chris was busy patrolling some other part of the garden, when he suddenly spotted a blot of color from the corner of his eye. When he turned his full attention towards it, the startling red became impossible to miss.

It was a red flower, illuminated by something that was definitely _not_ a floodlight. It was crazy, seeing so much brightness and color after three months of nothing but white, white, white; and what was more startling still was the fact that two people, Jeongin and Seungmin, were working right next to this bright red yet didn’t seem to notice it. Now, Felix grew up simple, but he wasn’t dumb. He knew that the other arrivals at the Facility were being drugged with something, and that whatever it was did not work on him. Still, to not notice something so bright...

He should find Chris. He should tell him, tell him that he could see the red while no one else could. He didn’t know why, but it seemed crucial that the Corrections Officer knew.

If this had happened a few weeks ago, Felix would have kept it to himself in fear that his state of awareness and 'non-druggedness' would be discovered and he himself would be put on a drug that actually worked. But he trusted Chris blindly. On top of that, Felix suspected that the older already knew that whatever he was getting injected with wasn’t effective. No, Chris would never betray him. This was a fact in Felix’s mind.

Slowly, so as to not draw attention to himself, Felix began walking around the garden in search for the older, avoiding the other boys who worked there. Hyunjin, who he knew from dance class, cast him a strange look, but soon enough turned back to his own work. It made Felix wonder how drugged his floor mates really were. Did they really not notice the red, or were they just pretending?

He had come to the edge of the garden when, out in the parking lot, he spotted a lone figure in white. Chris! The ease with which he recognized the older surprised him, but that wasn’t important right now. He had to tell Chris about what he’d seen!

*** * ***

Time dragged on for Chris. It was routine, marching along the garden rows and checking that everyone was doing their work, but it was no longer satisfying for the Corrections Officer. No; seeing the blank expressions of the teens as their hands worked relentlessly was more unsettling than anything else. Chris shuddered. Their eyes were blank, their faces were blank, their personality as plain and white as the uniform they all wore.

Perfect puppets, brainwashed into the same system, all uniqueness erased and stripped of personality until only a bare slate remained; perfect robots, model LIONS INC. employees.

This was so fucked up. He couldn’t comprehend, couldn’t fathom how it had taken him _two years_ before he noticed the state that this Facility put them in! Perhaps because now he had Felix; bright, shining, unaffected Felix, against whom all others seemed even blander... Perhaps it was because for the last two weeks Chris had been flushing his mandatory pills down the toilet instead of swallowing them...

No, this wasn’t right, this wasn’t how it was supposed to be! There’s got to be a way out, Chris thought, there’s got to be a way! Maybe he could take all of them off the drugs, but he’d need to talk to Woojin first, and if it was this hard to cover for one Felix then he couldn’t even begin to imagine how fucking hard it would be to cover for eight teenagers.

Looking up from his monitor and trying his best not to meet the empty eyes of J Y 0 0 2 1 ; L C -no, of _Jeongin_ , he reprimanded himself; that kid has a life and a personality and a _name_ \- Chris was about to move on with his patrol when something bright pierced his eyes. It took him a while to realize what it really was, what it was called, but once the thought entered his brain he couldn’t stop.

Color. It was a red with an intensity he had forgotten existed. Red, red… Red like apples, like traffic lights, like sunsets and sunrises, like bars and clubs and colorful make-up, like plump lips flushed with kisses… 

His hand reached out towards the red leaves. How… ? 

His gaze drifted upwards. There, up above his head, almost concealed by the bright shine of the floodlights, was a thin ray of different light. It was warmer, somehow, looked more yellow and more real, and it was definitely what unveiled the beautiful red in front of him. 

Chris didn’t even realize that his legs were carrying him towards the source of the light, away from the garden and towards the empty parking lot. He only regained conscious control of his body when he stopped, slightly out of breath more due to excitement than anything else, in front of a strange object on the ground. It was blinking in even intervals, and next to it lay a piece of material. Glass, maybe? He stepped closer.

A drone. The object at his feet was a drone, broken and shattered beyond repair, but still recognizable by the white propeller attached to it. Next to it, the piece of _something_ was definitely not glass. Chris picked up the bit of strange material, noting how smooth it felt on its flat edges, and how its color was an almost night-sky dark blue, while its inside was a mess of wires and ripped cables. He looked straight up from where he was standing, and sure enough, there was the source of this new, natural light that brought out the color in that garden plant. 

A piece of the dome, he realized, I’m holding a piece of the dome. Strange, how easily he forgot that the Facility as a whole was surrounded by a dome that kept out all noise and light, and that functioned as their sky, their means of telling and controlling time. What time might it actually be outside? Was the time on his monitor even right? What if, instead of night time, it’s actually morning out there, in the _real_ world? 

Pocketing the broken drone and the piece of dome, Chris followed a sudden impulse and walked briskly towards the edge of the parking lot. The closer he got, the more he started to notice a strange buzzing sound, extremely quiet, that sounded like electricity running through a million wires at once. He held out his hand in front of him, and to the Corrections Officer’s surprise, his hand touched a cold, but definitely dense surface. The air around his hand flickered and rippled, the image of the rest of the parking lot momentarily distorted: This wasn’t just a dome, this was an invisible yet impenetrable barrier that surrounded them day and night, Chris realized. 

Or rather, he would have thought it was impenetrable. As proven by the drone and the broken piece of dome bulging out his uniform pocket, this was clearly not the case. 

His mind buzzed almost as loudly as the invisible dome wall in front of him as Chris tried to sort out all of this new information. So the Facility was surrounded by a bubble-like dome that made it impossible to tell what was going on in the rest of the world; this he remembered learning on his first day at work. The Correctional Facility was effectively shut away from the rest of LIONS INC. and the world. What he didn’t know before was that the dome was apparently breakable. If the fragment of dome was anything to go by, then with enough force their electronic cage could be broken. With something big, like a car or a bus or… 

He only registered the sound of footsteps behind him when it was too late. Whirling around in a panic, the excuse was already on his tongue when-

“Chris?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeehaw I'm back! And now we move forward with the story... there's a bit of a time gap between the last chapter and this one, if you haven't figured it out already. 
> 
> Also, watch District 9 for reference of the scenes... for Chris' last part I essentially retold a bit of the MV.
> 
> This chapter has over 2.5K words, wow. 
> 
> Anyway, see you soon again (i hope)! huehuehuehuehuehue


	7. Sunset

“Chris?”

“Felix! What… ?” the words got stuck in Chris’ mouth, his brain finding no excuse ridiculous enough to explain this situation. Why he, the lead authority of Correctional Facility STR0325, left his post only to be found inexplicably touching the barrier of the dome that surrounded them.

The younger looked Chris up and down, wide eyes flitting to the uniform pockets that did a poor job of concealing an entire drone. 

“I guess you saw it too, then.”

“Saw what?” the older’s eyebrows pulled together in confusion, though he already had an inkling of what Felix was talking about. But it was better to pretend to be clueless. He could be guessing wrong after all. 

“You know what I mean Chris. I know you saw it! You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t see it.” Little hands frantically grabbed onto the Corrections Officer’s uniform with a sudden urgency.

“Felix, calm down, I still don’t know what you mean,” Chris reasoned with the younger, trying to pry the hands off of his uniform, “you’ve got to tell me what you’re talking about, Lix.” He settled for just covering the small hands with his own in what he hoped was a soothing manner. 

“Don’t belittle me Chris!” Felix yanked his own hands away. “I’m talking about the garden. The colors! The light! I know you saw it, Chris. I  _ know _ you did…”

This was what Chris was waiting for, his confirmation that not only was he not crazy, but that Felix also was as sick of this place as he was. His heart beat faster in his chest. This was his chance, this was  _ the _ moment! 

He grasped the younger’s hand with one of his own, tugging him away from the dome barrier and further towards the edge of the parking lot. 

“Come on, I have to show you something.”

The two made their way towards the gardens, stopping where Chris remembered having found the drone and broken splinter of dome. With a nod of his head, he motioned for the other to look upwards, at the dome ceiling above them. 

Felix gasped. There, high above their heads, surrounded by the mechanical flickering of the broken edges of the dome, was a small hole. And through it, through this seemingly tiny break in the time and space of the Correctional Facility, streamed a small beam of golden light. 

It was the most beautiful thing either of them had ever seen. 

The two boys stood in silence, eyes large and gaping up at the wonder above them. Felix gripped the older’s hand tightly as it threatened to slip out of his grasp. Time stood still. The only sound Chris registered was the beating of his heart… and the beating of Felix’s heart, which he couldn’t hear, but rather  _ felt _ through their entangled hands, matching the staccato rhythm of his own heart. 

This moment felt monumental. Chris had never been religious, most people in LIONS INC. weren’t, but this instant felt very much like a religious experience. 

“Chris,” came the whispered voice next to him, still quiet with awe, “Chris, I think… that’s the sunset.” 

His hand tightened around the smaller one in agreement. Felix was right… the golden light seemed like a sunset… His mind flashed with a thousand sunsets, red and purple and orange and fiery and soft, that he had witnessed in his life before coming to the Facility. Like a kaleidoscope of colors they seemed in his head, enhanced in beauty by memory and longing. 

No one said anything for a long while. Chris just kept holding the other’s hand, his own hand and heart feeling as warm and golden as that beam of light from above. It felt so  _ right _ . As right as he’d ever felt. Chris was convinced that his entire life led up to this very moment, that he was always meant to be standing under this light, holding Felix’s hand that fit perfectly into his, staring up at this break, this fault, this  _ glitch _ in the perfect system that raised him. 

“Do you remember the sunsets in Section 9?” He breathed, so quietly that Felix almost missed it.

“Yeah. They were… something.” The younger’s voice was tinged with painful nostalgia and melancholy and  _ yearning _ . Chris could understand every facet of that emotion. 

“I haven’t seen a sunset in over three years.”

“It feels like I haven’t seen one in forever… I can’t believe I never paid more attention to them before I came here,” Felix confided in the older. “But no sunset is as pretty as the ones back home in Section 9.”

Chris sighed. The sunsets in Section 9 were beautiful, the red sun reflecting off of the mountains and the water and casting everything into a breathtaking golden light. Something painful pulled at Chris’ chest; he wanted nothing more than to break free from all of this, to run towards this light, to touch it, to  _ leave _ this dull whiteness that surrounded him day and night. 

“We used to climb up on the rocks to watch them sometimes,” he said softly.

Felix smiled. “Sometimes I used to watch them from the roof of our old house. Mom used to make dinner and we’d take it up to eat on the roof while we watched the sun sink over the lake.”

The teen turned towards the older, freckles shining with tears Chris hadn’t noticed the younger shed. He almost moved to wipe the tears away, but his hand stopped shy of Felix’s cheek. He let his hand fall back down, opting instead to reach out and gently grasp the younger’s other hand into his.

“Leave with me, Felix.” The younger stared at him, with wide eyes. “Let’s go see the sunsets again, Lix, the sunsets and sunrises and colors… Leave here! Leave all this… Leave with  _ me _ .”

He watched emotions swim in the freckled teen’s eyes. Changing from surprise to thoughtfulness to anger to resolve, gears turning in his brain, trying to process this new information, this offer, with all its unspoken implications. Felix tilted his head up, his eyes searching again for the path of light above them. After a long minute of silence, he nodded curtly and spoke:

“Let’s.”

And Chris didn’t know how to go on from there. He had expected the younger to need convincing, to need encouragement, not for him to so quickly agree, but this was what he liked about Felix, he supposed. Although the younger seemed innocent and naive when they first met, Chris soon discovered that underneath the facade hid a quick and funny mind that was anything but dumb. It stunned him how many small details Felix seemed to catch; it impressed him, if he was honest, and drew him in closer towards the younger. 

“Yeah,” he breathed, squeezing the smaller hands that he still clutched in his. “Yeah.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WHEEEE THAT WAS SUCH A SHORT CHAPTER IM SORRYYYYYYY
> 
> but not to worry! I'll also be posting the next chapter within a day to make up for it!!!
> 
> I essentially wrote one giant-ass chapter but decided to split it into two because tonally the two parts clashed so much i gave myself whiplash writing it. 
> 
> anyway, here's a very very sweet moment of chris and felix being all couply and wanting to escape their dystopian government together. Relationship goals~


	8. It could have been you

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DOUBLE UPDATE!!! (just gonna quickly point out that I posted 2 chapters in a row, so if you just skipped to this one then do yourself a favor and go back to ch7 first)

“I’m telling you Chris, we should just do this alone! We have a much greater chance if we leave as just the two of us,” Felix argued loudly, pacing back and forth in Chris’ office, face flushing with visible irritation. Why couldn’t the older just _understand_? 

“No Felix, this is bigger than just us. This is about everyone, and we need to get as many people out as possible.” The older of the two was seated sideways in his office chair, arm dangling off the chair’s back, the other massaging his aching temples. 

“Don’t you understand Chris?! I don’t _care_ about everyone! I care about _us_ ! _We_ need to get out of here! Everyone else can stay here and rot for all I care!” At this point, the freckled teen was wildly gesticulating with his arms. Why couldn’t the other understand what he was saying?! This was so frustrating!

“Ok, calm down please. Shouting isn’t going to help anyone here, mate.”

“I’m not a fucking kid, Chris! Stop treating me like one!”

The Corrections Officer got out of his chair and approached his wildly pacing counterpart, keeping his own emotions in careful check. 

“Felix, can’t you see? What we have, it could be happening to anyone out there. It’s not about escaping the Facility, it’s about giving _everyone_ a way out,” he gently laid a hand on the other’s arm, attempting to calm the other down and not get mad himself.

“ _Fuck_ everyone else!” the younger yelled, slapping the offered hand away. “They’re gonna chase us, Chris, and maybe we have a chance at getting away, just us two, but our chances are gonna be down to fucking _zero_ if you decide to drag twenty-eight other kids with us! Oh, not to mention: Every single one of them is gonna be a liability, cause guess what? Any given moment they could contact management to fucking sabotage us. And then? No one’s gonna be free, Chris.” He closed in on Chris, pointing his finger at the older’s chest. “We’re all gonna die in here. We’re gonna get gunned down and shot. Every. Single. One.”

He hoped his words had some impact on the other. Taking everyone with them was just too risky. Sure, there were some inmates here that Felix somewhat trusted, like Jisung for example, or Changbin… but none of them as blindly as he trusted Chris. No, Chris was the priority.

They were gonna run away, and then the rich fucking assholes in District 0 could _suck it_. What better revenge than losing control of their prized asset? This is why he needed Chris to come with him alone… he didn’t want to get caught, let alone get Chris caught. At this point he didn’t know what he would think was the worst outcome of the two. No, it couldn’t even come to this. Him and Chris needed to escape, and do so unseen; they needed to be invisible. But being under the radar was gonna be impossible in a group of thirty.

Felix was so lost in his own stubbornness that it took him completely by surprise when Chris grabbed his wrist and yanked him closer, effectively catching Felix off balance and having to steady him by gripping the younger’s shoulders firmly. Their eyes met. 

“Stop! Now _you_ listen!” Chris’ voice was piercing. 

“This isn’t some fairytale where we run away and live together happily ever after, Felix, get your head out of your ass! Have you ever stopped to _think_ about the people you’re so willing to leave behind?! They’re good kids, Felix, every single one of them! They deserve to live! Really, _really_ live.”

He sighed.

“This place… I’ve seen what it does to people, bright young people. They lose their individuality, all of their passion. They become robots, just part of the background scenery. The worst thing is when, at the end of their stay here, I don’t even have to tell them to line up for their shots. They just do it by themselves… 

Felix, when you leave here, you’re faced with a choice. Management makes you pick the District you’re gonna work in for the rest of your life. But the kids here… they just stand in front of the monitor for hours and _hours_ because they don’t know what to pick, because they’re waiting for someone to do it for them, because they forget how to _think_ and _choose_.”

Felix swallowed as he saw the older’s eyes well up with emotion. Chris had gotten quieter and quieter as he spoke on, his yelling reduced to a whisper that seemed louder than anything he’d said before. 

“But I’m not gonna be like that, Chris. Whatever you’re injecting into me… it’s not working! I can still think and feel… I’m never gonna get like that, I promise,” the younger whispered back. 

“You could have been any one of them,” the other’s voice rang through the room, even if it was just a murmur, “you could have been empty like them. I’m not giving you anything, Felix.”

What…?

The realization rammed into Felix like a train, like a fist to the abdomen. 

Changbin’s tired smile flashed across his mind, Hyunjin’s numb and sloppy limbs during classes swam in front of his eyes, and suddenly he didn’t see his friends, no; he saw himself. His own tired smile, _his_ numb and sloppy limbs struggling through a dance routine, all while the static, which he had done his best to forget ever since he got out of the medical wing, this fucking static droned on and on, polluting his brain. 

“There’s got to be more out there, Felix, more for every one of us. This system… It’s killing us on the inside, and I have to stop it, don’t you understand? I have to do something to stop it…”

Felix looked up at Chris, and his lips quirked against his will. The older’s eyes were filled with a weariness that made him seem older than he actually was, but at the same time they shone, glittered weakly under the LED lights of the office, the twinkle portraying an ambition and determination that alone would have made Felix follow the other anywhere. This was really important to Chris, he understood this now; more important than just getting out of here alive. 

“I’m _tired_ , Felix. I’m tired of seeing Woojin’s face when he’s trying to decide what fucking antidepressant he should give Changbin next; I’m tired of Jeongin’s dead eyes during classes; I’m tired of seeing Jisung lose his creativity more and more every day; I’m tired of flushing my pills down the drain every morning; I’m tired of all this _white_ around us.” His shoulders sagged. “I just want out, Felix, and I want to save as many people as possible.”

Hyunjin’s fake, pained smile grew before Felix’s inner eyes once again, and he racked his brain to remember what Minho’s laugh sounded like, but came up with nothing. He swallowed, trying to somehow clear the dryness from his throat and failing.

“Ok.” Chris perked up at the younger’s words. 

“But on one condition: We only take people who we trust to have our back with us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OK SO HERE'S THE SECOND PART TO THE CHAPTER BEFORE!  
> YAY! DOUBLE UPDATE!
> 
> as you can see, totally different tone! I initially wrote about 400 words of a much darker version of this argument, but upon realizing that it absolutely does not fit with the story and character arcs, I scrapped it. 
> 
> Instead we have this absolutely (shitty) w o n d e r f u l transition into the creation of Stray Kids, a band of nine. Honestly, I needed some way in which to include the others in this escape, and this was one of the options that made most sense. How this is going to continue? Find out next chapter ;)
> 
> TMI: i listened to The Great Escape by Woodkid on repeat while writing this chapter. omfg all woodkid songs are wonderful angst fuel. 
> 
> I've been researching into dystopias and romantic subplots, and I've decided that first and foremost, this is a dystopian au, not a romance. Chris and Felix having feelings for each other is, as you probably already noticed, one of the catalysts for both of them to take action. 
> 
> Chris doesn't drug Felix because he is whipped™, and this results in them reminiscing about their home, which in turn causes Chris to realize how fucked up the Corrections Facility is, which in turn causes him to want to do something against this system.
> 
> Felix initially would have stayed quiet about his discovery, but because he trusts Chris he manages to find him in the parking lot. Felix wants to run away only with Chris, but because taking down the Facility is important to Chris he decides to compromise.
> 
> -> Felix makes Chris want to change the world into something better. Chris makes Felix want to be a better person and put aside his selfishness.


	9. District 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDITED
> 
> ok so i posted chapter 9 a few hours ago, but honestly wasn't satisfied with it. A reader pointed out a pretty big hole in the development of the story (thank you btw!) which i didn't notice while writing, so i decided instead of keeping the shameful chapter up while i edited it, i'd rather just delete it from ao3 and upload the new version when it's ready (haha don't worry I have everything on Word anyway)
> 
> regardless, please enjoy the New and Improved Chapter 9, aptly titled: "District 9"!

“How many do we have?”

“We’ve got six.” Chris shuffled over to his desk, sank down in the chair, and pulled up the complete list of arrivals to Corrections Facility STR0325 on his monitor. “Changbin, Hyunjin, Jeongin, Jisung, Minho, and Seungmin,” he read off the names as he scrolled down the list while Felix looked over his shoulder. 

“So… everyone who was at the gardens that night,” the younger concluded, pursing his pretty heart shaped lips in thought, unintentionally doing his absolute _best_ to distract Chris right now.

“Yeah, pretty much. Remember how you said no one noticed the break in the dome except you?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, I think everyone _did_ notice, they just didn’t, like… register it until I asked them about it. ‘Cause of the meds, you know.” It made sense. The medication didn’t make you any less smart or capable -that would be counterproductive- but instead numbed you to new information. Essentially, as Chris gathered from his two years of experience at the Facility, it meant that you automatically tune out new things that do not fit into the expected pattern, but you could still remember them if someone asked you to. 

Felix glanced over to Chris: “And you’re _sure_ we can trust them.”

“Of course.”

Seeing the look of short bewilderment on the older’s face, Felix resigned. Naturally, trusting the people he picked out was a given for Chris, like any suggestion otherwise would be unthinkable. It was endearing, really. Oh, he hoped that this was gonna go well.

“You know why I’m cautious,” Felix sighed, leaning in and letting his arm brush against Chris’ shoulder in a comforting and reassuring manner. ‘I’m still with you’, that touch tried to say, ‘I’m not gonna leave.’ He wasn’t sure how much of what he wanted to communicate really arrived on Chris’ end, but continued speaking anyway. Fuck it if he didn't have the right words.

“I just don’t wanna take any risk. Like, this is our only attempt. I really, really wanna get out with you, Chris…” Felix waited, still unsure if what he was planning to do was going to be the right thing.

His seated counterpart smiled up at him.

“I know. But trust me on this.”

Felix nodded. He trusted Chris, and he also (mostly) trusted the people Chris had picked out. He was kind of friends with Hyunjin, and he made really good friends with Jisung and Changbin. Jeongin was also young and he doubted that the youngest would have a reason to sabotage their mission. Seungmin was really smart, and while Minho wasn’t smart he was fucking _clever_ … no, he could imagine working with everyone Chris listed. This could absolutely turn out to their benefit.

Not to mention, Felix thought, the skills within the group would be fairly balanced. Hyunjin and Changbin trained to work with cyber tech and coding, and were probably good hackers ( _especially_ Changbin); Jisung was a chaotically creative mechanic; Seungmin was booksmart; Minho was one of the best actors Felix had ever seen… and it was almost scary how much Jeongin knew about chemicals. It made sense, seeing as the youngest of them would be taking over a LIONS INC. chemical branch one day, but hearing the innocent looking youngster list off the precise ingredients and ratios for a green smoke bomb on their first day at the facility was… concerning. 

And exciting. Really fucking exciting, if you asked Felix. There was nothing more fun than some improv, especially when the situation was critical. That’s why he used to love his job. The suspense, the mind-games, the do-they-don’t-they when talking to people who are used to having an entire room hang off of their every single word, the adrenalin induced racing of his heart when his act almost slipped up, when he lied straight through his teeth… 

But back to Chris. Felix had yet to reveal something, and he honestly wasn’t sure how the older would react to the news. Although Felix was sure that this would not change anything between them; they trusted each other, and right now he had to trust Chris to handle the news well. It had taken a lot, on Felix’s part, to convince himself that this was the right thing to do, that this was _necessary_. He wasn’t someone to easily trust others (it’s been hammered into this skull that everyone around him is a suspect with an ulterior motive from his first day of training onwards), but he wanted to be better: Be someone that Chris could trust blindly to have his back; be someone who doesn’t question himself when trusting Chris.

Felix shifted from one foot to the other. The older of the two looked up from the monitor at the movement, raising his eyebrows inquisitively. 

“I… I still have to tell you something.”

“Hm?”

“I didn’t tell you before, 'cause I didn’t really know if it would work out or not-” Felix’s confession was interrupted by a series of soft knocks on the office door. Chris’ eyes flew wide open, and he scrambled up from the chair, ready to usher Felix to the bathroom to hide, when the freckled teen put a hand on his lower arm. 

“I told Woojin that we needed to talk to him.”

“You _what_?!”

Before Felix could answer for himself, the door to the office swung open. 

Of course, Chris thought, Woojin has access to the office, too. He straightened up as the Correctional Educator approached the pair, eyes open inquisitively.

“Alright, does somebody wanna tell my _why_ you wanted to talk?”

Chris gulped. It felt very much like he was being questioned right now, like any false move would lead the oldest to immediately report both their asses to management. It was fucking _risky_ , what Felix just did… 

Felix shuffled forward: “Well, you see, Chris and I… we’ve been talking, and it-” The teen clearly didn’t know where to start explaining everything, like the fact that they were planning to fucking _break out_ of the Facility. Chris would have loved to help, but he was currently pretty much speechless and freaking out. 

There was no guarantee that Woojin was in. Talking to the other arrivals had been, in comparison, _so_ much less nerve-racking, mainly because Chris knew that if the plan to initiate Woojin backfired, then damage control wouldn’t be as simple as picking out the right drug to make the older forget. No, if the plan to initiate Woojin backfired, then Chris could absolutely _count_ on having to drug Felix again, as well as receiving a stern earful… and that was still the best outcome. Worst case scenario: Woojin reports his ass to management, Felix is gonna get sent to another Facility and Chris is gonna go to prison.

He’s not gonna survive in prison! Not to mention, he would never be able to see Felix ever again!

While Chris’ thoughts were still running a mile a minute, Felix continued to struggle through his words.

“Well, we’ve been talking about, you know, _us_ and, like, being _here_ and, well, we-”

“Look,” Woojin sighed, clearly annoyed, “I don’t care that you two are dating. Do I think it’s ideal? Of course not. But I trust you two to keep it professional. Was that it? Because I have better things to do.”

Felix spluttered, gone completely red in the face, while Chris did his best to avoid making eye contact with the oldest.

“No, no, that’s not it! That wasn’t why we…” Felix turned around to Chris, a wordless ‘help me out here!’ in his gaze. The older of the two sighed.

“Felix and I, we’re gonna try and escape.” 

It was as if a bomb had exploded in the room, except instead of noise it drenched everything in a black, bottomless silence. The silence draped itself over the three figures: laid down heavily across Felix’s face as he attentively watched every millisecond of Woojin’s movement; pushed on Chris’ shoulders and urged him to draw in on himself in fear of how the oldest might react; slowly crawled across Woojin’s brain as he tried to process what had happened.

It was as if three hearts all stood still at once, until Woojin swallowed and spoke.

“How… how are you planning to do it?”

“We don’t know yet,” Chris conceded, “but there’s a few people we wanna take with us.” He fought past his need to flee the scene, and instead approached the oldest.

“When’s the last time any one of us has seen a sunset, Wooj? Don’t you think… there’s gotta be something better out there, something for _all_ of us! Someplace where we can be free and _different_?”

“Chris… we're all different. We all have our jobs and we do them, but that doesn’t make us any less human-”

“Then why does it feel like we’re all the same?! We’re all brainwashed into the same system! They expect perfection, but to be perfect we have to all fit into the same fucking mold, Woojin! How can we be different?!”

"It's not that simple, Chris. We have a responsibility and a-"

“I’m off my meds,” Felix cut in. He glanced at Chris, who had begun gesturing wildly with his arms, but soon his eyes were drawn back to Woojin, who still stood, as if in a daze, in front of the closed door. 

“I know, Felix,” the Correctional Educator said quietly, “and I’m not going to ask you to go on them again, but please, you two need to come to your senses! Whatever you’re planning… it’s too dangerous.”

But Chris was having none of it: “No, _you_ need to come to your senses! Look at everyone around you! They’re dull, they’re _robots_ , for fuck’s sake! Every one of these kids… Remember BamBam? Remember him? I do. I fucking _remember_ how his eyes turned dead!” 

He was fuming at this point, no longer caring about the hurtful memories his acidic words brought back up to the surface.

“I _remember_ how, when he was supposed to pick out the District he was gonna work in… how he just fucking _stood there_ . We watched him for _two hours_ , remember?” His voice turned into a whisper as he leaned in to look Woojin in the eye. “We watched that fucking kid stand in front of a monitor for two _fucking_ hours.”

It had been one of the most painful moments of their lives, and neither of them liked remembering it. Woojin’s heart clenched as the poisonous words burned hole after hole into the carefully constructed wall of ignorance he had surrounded memories like this one with. BK6529 had turned into a walking corpse under the watchful eye of the Facility, and now it felt like his dead eyes were staring into Woojin’s soul from somewhere in the corner of his vision.

“Now you tell me- _tell me_ that this is how it’s supposed to be! That this is right! _Tell me_ that you agree with this, and Felix and I will stay.”

“Chris I… I can’t, you know I can’t,” Woojin stuttered, “I miss BamBam too… but this- it’s too dangerous! You’ll never make it out.”

Felix, whom both had somewhat forgotten was still in the room, suddenly appeared at Chris’ side, his eyes shining with determination and confidence.

“That’s why you’re gonna help us. We’re leaving, and we’re taking everyone we can out of here.”

Chris, sensing that the younger was already sure in having convinced the Correctional Educator, went to deliver the final blow:

“Join us, Woojin. Let’s leave this place, together.”

*** * ***

_Two weeks later…_

Chris unfolded the blueprint of the Facility STR0325 and laid it out on the floor, in the middle of the circle formed by the nine boys (himself included), to where Woojin was shining a flashlight. The teens were gathered in the maintenance building, near four rumbling washing machines, while the other half of the inmates, accompanied by a substitute educator, were outside performing voluntary labour in the gardens. No one suspected a thing about Chris’ group doing anything but laundry, and Woojin’s excuse to join them was sound, so Chris could be sure that they’d be left alone for a while. 

He smiled at the oldest, knowing that Felix made the right choice in including Woojin in their plans. He as proud of Felix; without Woojin’s help it would have been impossible to make it this far while keeping the whole situation under cover. 

“Here’s Sector 5, where we are,” he used his finger to point at the white lines on blue paper, where they formed a rectangular shape, “we’re pretty much smack in the center of the Facility, so the only part of Sector 5 that doesn’t touch another Sector would be this side, by the parking lot.” His finger traced along the corresponding stretch of space.

“So that’s where we need to escape through,” Seungmin concluded. 

“Exactly. With enough force, the dome can be shattered. Felix and I were thinking of using one of the busses.”

The freckled teen to Chris’ right nodded: “If we run the bus through the dome at full speed, we should be able to break through.”

“But aren’t all compound door locked at night?” Minho, who hesitated to speak up before, raised his head to look at Chris, who they had unanimously elected as their leader.

“You’re right, but the locks can be disabled… they automatically open when there is a fire alarm.”

“So we cause a fire?” 

Everyone’s faces all mirrored varied stages of horror and shock as they looked at their youngest.

“... No,” Chris continued after recovering from the momentary bafflement, “that’s too dangerous. I’d really like to avoid that if we can.”

This was where Jisung perked up: “If the lock is automatic, then it can be rewired to open at a certain time every night. It’s pretty simple actually, you just like, have to adjust the trigger that causes it to unlock in the first place -during a fire alarm, like you said- to any given time.”

“You could do that?”

“Yep! I just need access to the main electric switchboard.”

Chris nodded. “The switchboard is right next to the control room, in _this_ part of the building.” He used his finger to indicate an area close to the back of the main Sector 5 building, where the blueprint indicated the presence of a medium-sized and a small room. 

“What about the cameras?” Hyunjin asked from across the circle.

“Yeah, Chris. There’s cameras everywhere in the main building. That’s gonna the fastest way for us to get caught,” Felix joined in, causing a flurry of ideas being thrown around the circle, practically every member of their group having their own take on how to deal with this situation.

“I can get them to replay the same footage at night.” Changbin, who had previously never spoken up, commanded silence. Upon the leader’s inquisitive gaze, he cleared his throat and continued. 

“If I can get to the control room I can set up the cameras to play the same footage every night. No one should notice. Nothing goes on at night anyways. I can also leave a few cameras outside the main building to work as they usually do, so it’s not too suspicious.”

Felix smiled at the typically moody teen’s words. It was all coming together!

“Right. We’ll also need to get the bus ready. I’d volunteer, but I think management is already monitoring my schedule pretty closely, with me changing it so much lately…” Chris trailed off, sneaking a slightly embarrassed side glance at Felix, the reason for his frequent changes in time regiment.

“I got it,” Woojin couldn’t help but shoot a knowing smirk in Chris’ direction. 

“Thanks, Wooj. But! We can’t do anything before we disable the locks and deal with the cameras. I’m thinking me, Jisung, and Changbin could go to the control room during the day, get everything set up, and then you, Changbin, delete the footage of us coming to the control room?”

Seeing the two addressed boys nod in agreement, Chris turned back to Woojin. 

“For the bus we'll need clothes, food, water… and a first aid kit if we can, Woojin. I’m counting on you.”

“Of course!”

Chris was about to continue when he spotted Jeongin shyly raising a hand in question.

“What are we gonna do when we’re out?”

To be honest, Chris had no fucking clue. His plans stretched until the moment they broke through the dome barrier. He didn’t really have anything in mind for _after_ , and floundered at the question, until Felix (Lord bless him, what an angel) saved him from embarrassment.

“The Facilities are located around District 8 in a ring formation. We’re currently in the outermost part of LIONS INC., on the outside of the last District.”

Felix looked up and into the circle.

“After we break out, we’ll be in no-man’s-land. I think it’s still LIONS INC. territory, ‘cause there used to be living settlements there… or plans for them, at least… but it’s all abandoned now.”

Chris hastily jumped onto the new information, not paying any mind to _how_ Felix could have possibly known this.

“It’s the best place for us to hide. We’ll definitely be chased, or at least monitored, so we’ll need to keep low for a while.”

He was met with nods and hums of agreement. Chris smiled. It really, really was going to work out, and he couldn’t have picked better people to do this with. LIONS INC., the whole system, was gonna go down. He’d sworn to himself to make this world a better place, a place where he could actually see himself live, really _live_. A place where he could watch the sunset every day, a place where no one had to suffer the corporation’s injustices any longer… a place where he would want Felix to live in, all nine of them to live in.

“Abandoned place… What are we gonna call it?” he joked absentmindedly as he rolled the blueprint back up, giving everyone else the cue to get ready to return to their respective work posts and pretend that nothing important occurred this evening. 

Chris wasn’t expecting an actual response from anybody, especially not from the typically reserved Minho, so he (and everyone else) was doubly surprised when the beautiful teenager suggested, with a sarcastic smile tugging at his lips:

“District 9.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YEEHAW ok this is definitely the longest chapter I have written so far, over 3k words.... 
> 
> But I'm glad I did. The entire conversation with Woojin in the office was not included in the previous version, but honestly I think the office scene turned out very nice. I worked my ass off for this :( pls show it some love...
> 
> Thank you for all your nice comments, kudos, bookmarks, and for just sticking around! Thanks again to the reader who left me some honest feedback (I don't remember your name SORRY), I was able to learn a lot from this. I'm also sorry that your comment got deleted when I deleted the whole chapter, but that shit HAD TO G O! Y'all deserve some good dystopian fanfiction, alright? ALRIGHT!
> 
> (Also happy birthday STAY!!!! It's been a year since we got our fandom name, and it's been a pleasure hanging with y'all)


	10. Midnight

Three figures were heading through the corridors of the Facility. They passed the cafeteria and marched towards the end of the hallway, their white uniforms perfectly blending into the white of the walls and tiled white floor. 

At the end of the hallway was an inconspicuous door, small and likely to lead only to a supply closet; yet it was anything but. The tallest of the three figures lifted his hand to the keypad lock and punched in a six-digit security code, upon which they heard a small click. He pushed down the door handle and the three figures filed inside. 

Chris looked around. He’d only been here once or twice before. The control room was rather small; three desks with three computers on them faced a large screen that covered the entirety of one wall, while the opposing wall was made of what looked like a disarray of complicated wires and switches and buttons, with cables running to and fro, and several glass casings preventing the accidental pushing of certain buttons. The labels on the switchboard looked like they were written in a foreign language, and Chris was suddenly glad that he was not chosen to be a mechanics student. 

“This what you’re looking for?” he asked, turning around to Jisung and Changbin.

“Absolutely!” the youngest nodded, with a bright squirrel smile on his face, and excitedly turned around to the switchboard. “She looks like an absolute darling. Oh, and everything’s labelled too! God, this is cool!”

While Jisung was busy appraising the switchboard and chattering to himself - or maybe to all of them, Chris wasn’t quite sure… not that it made a difference, since the teen was answering his own questions anyway - Changbin had quietly moved to one of the computers on the desk. 

“Everything alright with you, too?”

Changbin nodded, face stoic but eyes glinting. He was excited too; they all were. It was absolutely nerve-wracking, and Chris had been unable to fall asleep last night due to all the excitement and worry that consumed his mind. But it was gonna be alright. This was going to work out. The set up was going to go perfectly, and they would escape this place, and then-

His train of thought was interrupted by Jisung, who was at this point elbows-deep into the circuits and wires.

“Do you guys mind if I talk? I’m just gonna talk. I really like to talk when I’m focused on something.”

Of course the teen would run his mouth, Chris mused, but seeing Changbin’s nonchalant shrug he assumed that it would be alright. Hell, maybe it would ease the tension that had threatened to fill the room before, when the only noises were the clacking of the keyboard and the shuffling of cords and wires, the three of them completely in their zone. 

“You know, this is actually really cool. I mean, I’ve always wanted to do, like, something cool and fun like this. Something adventurous,” Jisung blabbered on, “I feel like we make a pretty neat group too. I’m the tech guy, Changbin’s like the dark hacker type, and Chris, you’re our invincible leader. Oh my god, we totally need a name! What should we call ourselves?”

Chris looked at the youngest, while Changbin seemed set on ignoring him. 

“Why would we need a name?”

“Well,  _ because _ , my dear mighty leader, no badassery happens without a kickass group name! We need something fiery, something fierce, something that will absolutely  _ blow your mind _ … a name that tells everybody that we mean business. Big men will fear us, and LIONS INC. shareholders will tremble in their beds at the mere Thought of us!”

Out of the corner of his eye, Chris could see the left corner of Changbin’s mouth lifting into a smirk, despite the teens efforts to ignore the rambling Jisung.

“Oh, I know!” the aforementioned teen suddenly yelled, whipping around to stare at the two elder guys in the room. “We should be called 3Racha!”

“You’re naming us after a condiment?”

“Why not? There’s three of us, sriracha is a hot sauce, and we’re pretty hot too, so…”

Chris heard Changbin snort. 

“Are you agreeing with this?!” he asked, focusing his attention on the only one out of the three to be sitting in a chair. 

But Changbin only shrugged: “Sounds good. I’m almost done here anyways.”

“Oh me too!” Jisung piped up, because of course he did. “I just need to replug some wires, and we should be set!”

“Good. Changbin, what’s the situation with the cameras, exactly?”

“I erased footage from all Sector 5 cameras from since we came until five fourty-seven PM. It’s just gonna look like we had a blackout in the entire Sector.”

Chris leaned over Changbin’s shoulder, studying the monitor filled with symbols and camera views. Naturally, he had absolutely no idea what was going on on the screen. 

“The cameras to our rooms, the ones in the corridors, and in the parking lot are also going to be looping footage from yesterday night. From eleven at night ‘til six in the morning we can basically do whatever we want.”

“Nice!” Jisung had joined the two of them. “The doors should all unlock at midnight for two hours, by the way. The switches to the inmate doors looked a little weird, but I think I got it.”

Chris couldn’t help but crack a proud smile. It seemed like everything was coming together so smoothly, he felt on top of the world, and suddenly the fears of last night seemed like childish nightmares, like imaginary monsters in the closet. No, Felix and Chris would get out of here, they  _ all _ would get out of here, towards freedom, towards the sunset.

“Excellent work guys,” the leader praised. “3Racha, let’s head out!”

*** * ***

Nothing could ruin Chris’ mood as the leader placed his breakfast tray on the cafeteria bench that he shared with Woojin. Three nights ago Changbin, Jisung, and himself - 3Racha, he smirked at the ridiculous name - made their little expedition to the control room, and the following night Chris and Woojin tested the doors in the corridor and entrance. And as expected, at midnight sharp, the doors unlocked. 

He was happier than ever, and the overall atmosphere of Sector 5 was a lot brighter these days. They were all brimming with excitement at the prospect of escape, and the infectious attitude of Chris and Woojin caught on with the rest of the nine. Felix was absolutely  _ beaming _ these days (which caused Chris some strange breathing problems), Minho was joking around, Jeongin was being his snarky self, and even Changbin cracked a few jokes and played along with the others’ idiocy. 

But of course, of course, this state of happiness could not last for very long, as Chris could already feel a pit growing in his stomach when Woojin approached their table, tray in hand and a worried expression on his face. 

“Chris,” he whispered as he placed his tray down, “I got a message from management today.”

Chris instantly paled at the implications, but the oldest continued on: “We’re going to move the busses, all of them, to the parking lot in Sector 4.” 

“What? Is it the twentieth already?” He shook his head, slightly less shocked, but still wowed by how fast time had flown by. Of course! How could he forget! The twentieth of every second month was always the day that the busses were transported to a new location, rotating around the Facility, as an additional safety precaution to prevent the exact situation that Chris and the eight other teens had been planning. And today was the twentieth of March. 

Damn it! They should have acted faster! Now everything was going to be more complicated.

“It’s no big deal, really,” Woojin shrugged, “It’s just a fence. I can drive through.”

Right. Sector 4 and Sector 5 of the Facility were separated by a large wire fence, and there were gates between the two Sectors that Woojin could probably drive a bus through. But still. 

“Are you sure? We can’t damage the bus too much, we still have to crash it through the dome,” he replied, mood definitely sinking. The dome that surrounded the entire Facility was going to take a much greater toll on the bus than the gates that separated the Sectors within the Facility. The worst thing that could happen was that the bus would not gain enough force to crash through the dome, and they’d be stuck.

“Of course, they’re pretty weak gates. Anyway that isn’t actually what I came to talk about.”

Chris’ eyes snapped open. More bad news? What else could have possibly gone wrong? Judging by the fact that Woojin was not completely panicking, and that no armed guards have come to escort the nine of them away yet, it couldn’t be fatal, yet the older’s furrowed brows indicated that it was still an important issue. 

Seeing Chris’ questioning eyes, Woojin continued. 

“Seungmin approached me this morning. He said he’d tried his door last night… and it was locked.”

“What?! But I thought Jisung disabled it?”

“Whatever he did, it didn’t work. At least on the inmate doors.”

“It can’t be. We checked all the main doors, and they’re opening just fine.”

“And I’m telling you that the inmate doors aren’t.”

Chris sighed. Of course, it was only natural. The doors to the rooms of arrivals were probably secured with an additional measure… maybe something that didn’t need to be reset if there ever was a power shortage or something… Really, he should have predicted it. It’s not as if LIONS INC. was just going to let them waltz out of the facility. 

“Let me see what I can do. We’ll be back in an hour.”

Back to the control room we go, Chris thought, as he pushed himself out of the chair, breakfast forgotten, and marched towards the table where the teenagers were sitting.

The conversation stilled as they saw the Corrections Officer approach them. Felix and Jisung were locked in what appeared to be a very heated game of rock-paper-scissors, with Minho, Seungmin, Jeongin, and Hyunjin cheering them on, while Changbin was busy tucking into his peach yogurt and quickly moving on to snatch away Hyunjin’s portion.

“Jisung, Changbin, come with me for a sec,” the self-proclaimed leader motioned, to which Jisung let out a victorious cheer of “Hell yeah, 3Racha reunion, let’s get it!”. He quickly herded the younger two into a corner of the cafeteria that was relatively out of camera view, and began explaining the situation to them, as they mirrored the same look of worry that he probably had on his own face during his conversation with Woojin. 

“Ok, we’re gonna need to go to the control room again. Woojin and I found out that the doors to your rooms don’t unlock at night, and we need to find out why.”

“But I’m absolutely sure they should open,” Jisung cried, “all the doors should. I didn’t make a mistake, Chris!”

“I know you did your best, but for whatever reason, while the main doors in the Facility are open at night, the doors to your rooms just aren’t.” When the puffy-cheeked teen tried to protest again, Chris silenced him with a look. “Woojin and I are thinking it’s probably also an automatic lock, probably controlled by the Facility security system.”

Jisung blinked, and Chris could see that this was an option that hadn’t even occurred to the mechanic in training. Inwardly, he sighed. They were all good, passionate people, the nine of them, but like Jisung, you couldn’t discount the fact that none of them, save for Woojin and himself, have even completed their required schooling. They were still kids, even if they strayed from the rules and expectations of the System and of LIONS INC. They still had to find themselves, and still had much to learn. 

Changbin spoke up in his typical, rough and nasally tone: “If the doors are locked via the main security system, that means they’re hackable.”

“You think you can do it?” Chris watched the dark teen shrug, exuding confidence. 

The leader nodded. They hacked into the system once, they can do it again. They unlocked the doors once, they could do that again, too! If the bus was going to be somewhere else, then one of them is just going to have to drive it here. Yeah, this was doable, he thought as he headed out of the cafeteria once again, flanked by Changbin and Jisung. When he looked over his shoulder, back towards the room filled with eating teens, he saw Felix giving him a smile and a thumbs-up. 

He smiled back. Felix shouldn’t be worrying, but it was still nice that the younger cheered Chris on so much. Even though he’d only known Felix for three and a half months, it felt like they already knew each other inside out. Felix would always have his back, Chris was absolutely certain; he could count on it, in just the same way as Felix could count on Chris to have  _ his _ back. 

He was absolutely ready to leave this place, leave with Felix. As he walked down the corridor once again, his mind kept swimming with pictures, painting imaginary red sunsets onto the white walls, and maybe, maybe also sunshine smiles and crescent eyes and sparkling freckles... Escaping the Facility, the control of LIONS INC. meant freedom, freedom to be yourself and unique and different, and for Chris, there was also this tiny, small, Felix-sized addition to the list of benefits. He wanted Felix to always smile as brightly as he just smiled at Chris, to always be happy, to always be his careless, funny, and energetic self.

He trusted the freckled teen with his life. Chris knew, after all, that there was nothing that they could ever hide from each other. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time: *passes normally*
> 
> Chris: I have been hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray, run amuck, and flat out deceived  
> __________  
> jesus fuck i should really update more frequently. but every time i post a chapter it takes me a while to recharge.
> 
> anyway, for some reason this chapter was really difficult for me to write, and i don't know why. I spent more time on it than i did on other chapters, but I'm still not satisfied with it for some reason. idk.
> 
> HOWEVER THAT MAY BE, thank you to every single person who reads, comments, bookmarks, or leaves kudos. Especcially the comments, aaaaaaa. Have i mentioned that i go absolutely crazy for validation? I think i must have only said it a couple times...


	11. Better watch out

Hyunjin blinked at the digital clock on the wall opposite to where he was standing.

2 4. 0 3. 2 1 : 3 6, it read. 

It was March already. It seemed like only last week did he have to leave his friends at the Training Center for Programming behind, yet at the same time it felt like he had been at the Correctional Facility for his entire life. 

He wondered what home was like right now. District 5 this time of year was always coming out of its winter-induced slumber and slowly warming up to the world again: Children playing in the streets, the roads full of puddles and dirt, almost inaccessible, and the ice retreating to reveal that it had once again torn holes into the already demolished asphalt. Clothes swaying gently on clothing lines that zigzagged between the balconies and windows of buildings eight, maybe nine floors tall… so tall that their roofs seemed to be touching, the vertical slums a testament to the downfall of a formerly significant and now irrelevant District.

His father was probably working on repairing their truck, now that the roads could handle a delivery truck again. His mother was probably fretting about the state of their pantry, and rushing to restock on fresh goods before her factory shift began, since they likely ran out of potatoes again… like every year, Hyunjin sighed. His grandma was probably sitting in the one room serving as the living room and kitchen and bedroom simultaneously, with Kkami on her knees, instructing his mother on how to do everything properly, because his grandma always,  _ always _ knew better than everyone else. Naturally. 

It had been so long since he saw his family. At fifteen, all schools issued the children of LIONS INC. a corporate exam, determining their strengths and abilities and consequently their future careers; the children were then shipped off to one of the Training centers within their home District. And Hyunjin had been like everyone else. When his school announced that it was time for The Examinations, he had gone home and packed his bag, bid his parents and grandmother and dog goodbye, and walked into the testing facility… one of thousands of young boys, all just as nervous and excited as he was. 

It hadn’t been hard. No, it was all pretty easy. They put a headset on him, told him to solve some riddles and find some patterns, and the next thing he knew he was presented with a ‘Scholarship for the Gifted: all expenses paid!’ in a programming course. He hadn’t even known what programming was at that point. Hyunjin just remembered being really confused. 

He glanced to his left. Felix turned his head at the movement, looking at Hyunjin and smiling, of course, always smiling. He didn’t know what the freckled teen did to come to this Facility, but it probably wasn’t something stupid (like sending two guys to the hospital during a fistfight) The younger didn’t look like he had much physical power, though Hyunjin knew he was flexible and extremely agile, so it probably wasn't because the younger was getting into fights (unlike _someone,_ Hyunjin scoffed at himself).

Felix was from District 2, the fishing and farming District that was notoriously under financed and poor, but Hyunjin knew that their living experiences were totally different. He’d tried to talk to the younger about his life before the Correctional Facility, but Felix never  _ acted _ poor in the sense Hyunjin thought someone ought to; the wooden fishing towns of District 2 were a polar opposite of the concrete urban slums of District 5, even in terms of their atmosphere, Hyunjin decided. Back home getting into a fight with the neighborhood kids had been the most natural thing in the world, so natural that it got him into trouble when he continued to squabble with others even in the Training Center, but he could never imagine Felix or Chris in that kind of a situation. Felix was too sweet to ever fight, and Chris was too… Chris. 

Speaking of Chris, Hyunjin could hear the rattling of the Corrections Officer’s trolley in the hallway outside. The wheels on the white cart were squeaking and protesting against the tiled floor, and next to him Felix straightened his posture and smoothed down his hair. They were all lined up, with their backs against their room doors, waiting for the evening roll call conducted by Chris and Woojin though, as Hyunjin realized, the eldest was nowhere to be seen. Strange, he thought, of Chris to do this by himself, even if Woojin regularly missing these last four days. He knew, because Chris had explained it to all of them, that Woojin was preparing the bus for their escape, but still, all doors closed at ten o’clock and it was risky of Woojin to do that sort of thing now of all times. 

Hyunjin sighed. Their escape… He felt sorry for his parents and his grandma, he felt so sorry that they not only had to hear that their son got admitted to a Correctional Facility because of  _ fighting _ , but also that he was now missing. Or that he would be missing. 

He steeled himself. At least they would not be in any debt because of him, his scholarship would take care of that. He’d heard horror stories from his friends (and from his grandmother, that woman talked a lot when the day was long) about families that were left in debt for multiple  _ generations _ because of the amounting tuition costs. And it’s not like anyone could choose not to get trained if they didn’t have the money, no: LIONS INC. policy was that all children should attend a Training Facility, there was no alternative. One more reason, he mused, to escape: To stick it to the greedy bastards that forced families into debt just so their children could be factory workers, home cleaners, or truck drivers. 

On his left, Felix was beaming at Chris, who was scanning the code on the teen’s wrist, and soon enough the Corrections Officer moved on to Hyunjin. He held his left hand out, and the older took him by the palm to move the scanner over Hyunjin’s wrist ID, when the younger noticed something slipping into his upturned hand. Something small, something round, no, cylindrical? Was it an accident, did Chris mean to do it? Hyunjin racked his brain for answers; they hadn’t agreed on a code or a sign for the escape plan back in the maintenance building. He’d thought, afterwards, that this lack of communication was a major loop hole in their escape, and he remembered Jeongin agreeing with him. Could this be it?

Chris looked into Hyunjin’s eyes, their gazes meeting for a fleeting but incredibly meaningful moment, and Hyunjin closed his fist around the small object. Yes. The look the leader had given him was undoubtedly it, _this_ was the sign, this was the plan. From his left, Felix was still grinning at him, but this time the younger’s face split into a smile that included his eyes, a much more genuine smile. One that was hopeful. 

A loud ring sounded through the Facility, announcing that the room doors would now be open, and the inmates that were lined up against the walls turned around, opening the doors and disappearing inside. Hyunjin almost placed the small object onto the nightstand, before he remembered that Changbin had said the cameras in their rooms were only safe to ignore  _ after _ eleven o’clock, and stopped himself. It wasn’t eleven yet, so he had to wait a little longer, even if he was bouncing with excitement. 

He busied himself with brushing his teeth and changing into his sleeping clothes; he just couldn’t wait for eleven o’clock to arrive… but wait. At ten all the lights were switched off, except for a few ones outside. It would be alright to wait until eleven, but his room did not have a window to the outside, so he would be left to inspect the object in only the faint light from the corridor. Which he couldn’t, if there was any writing on it, since the corridor itself would be dark, with only two or three windows facing the sparingly illuminated parking lot outside. No, he had to find another plan. 

Glancing up at the camera in the top corner of his room, Hyunjin trotted over to his bed, and kneeled by his bed stand. He took out a few objects: a comb, a bottle of hand lotion, and chapstick, placing them on the bed, when, Oh No!, his chapstick rolled off the mattress and  _ conveniently _ fell under it. 

Congratulating himself on the clever design of the scheme, Hyunjin crawled under the white bed frame. Once his body was safely hidden away from the camera, he carefully opened his left hand to see what Chris had dropped into his palm; there, in the centre of his fist, was a small, red scroll of paper! It was somewhat difficult to get his right hand under the bed as well, but with a bit of wiggling and a lot of cursing the fact that his room did not have a window and he was stuck reading escape plans  _ under his fucking bed _ , Hyunjin managed to unroll the red piece of paper. 

_ Door open @ 1. Follow Changb. Quiet! _

He grinned. There it was… in a few short hours they would finally get out of here! Hyunjin clenched the paper in his fist again, and crawled out from under the bed, pretending to have retrieved the conveniently fallen chapstick. It was almost ten, so the lights should be out soon, he thought as he crawled under the covers and closed his eyes. 

But he shouldn’t fall asleep. Even as the lights turned off on his ceiling, and when the corridor lights followed suit five minutes later; even as he was bathed in almost pitch black darkness, Hyunjin’s mind was working. One AM could not come soon enough. 

It was so dark that even when he did open his eyes, it was almost as if he hadn’t. Or maybe he’d never closed his eyes in the first place? Only when he reached up to wave his hand in front of his own face did he confirm that he was indeed awake. That was important. What could be worse than  _ missing _ their fucking escape?

He wondered what the others were doing right now. Seungmin, Minho, Jeongin, Felix, and Jisung all had rooms with windows that looked out towards the parking lot, so they were probably reading their messages right now. Changbin’s room was on the same side as Hyunjin’s, so he didn’t have a window outside either, but the seemingly moody teen was crazy good with camera-related stuff, so he likely figured out a way to read the paper, just like Hyunjin had. He really admired the older, and it was a pity that Hyunjin would have to escape with only three years of Programming experience under his belt. He would have liked to be able to at least hold a torch to the coding prodigy that was Changbin. 

Come to think of it, there was still a lot that Hyunjin didn’t know about their group. The nine of them had talked, sure, and had all been something resembling friends way before Chris approached them individually to talk about the evening at the gardens, but they weren’t as close as he would have liked them to be. Once the drugs wore off and talking to people became enjoyable and important again, they all tried to make up for it, of course, but  _ still _ , Hyunjin felt like they were very much still skirting around each other, still finding things out about one another. 

Minho, for example: Hyunjin knew that the teen came from the elite, but with the way Minho acted he could have come from any regular District. Maybe it was because Minho didn’t  _ do _ anything, not like Hyunjin did, that was disruptive enough to get sent to a Correctional Facility. It made him wonder, as he remembered the way Minho moved (with grace but still down to earth and grounded), what the older’s childhood might have been like... Hyunjin himself had never been to District 0, never seen the heart of LIONS INC. Maybe one day, he would. 

He had no idea what time it was. Did an hour pass, or only ten minutes? Was it safe to move? He’d been so lost in his own mind that he’d forgotten to find a way to keep time… Fuck. Hyunjin stilled in his bed, trying to make as little noise as possible. What if the door was already open, but he’d never heard? What if everyone had already left? No, they wouldn’t forget about him! (Right?) He wanted so desperately to move to the door and peak underneath, to try and see  _ something _ , but what if it wasn’t past eleven yet? He’d never know, but LIONS INC. would. 

Hyunjin was panicking, his eyes darting around the room, when suddenly he spotted movement out of the corner of his eye. Under the door! The faint light from under the door had flickered as a shadow passed by slowly. Hyunjin’s ears strained, but he couldn’t hear a sound. 

It must’ve been Chris! That was the only logical explanation, after all: If it were anyone but Chris, they wouldn’t bother about making noise. Trying to contain his excitement and doing his best to remain silent, Hyunjin slowly slipped out from under the covers and traipsed over to the door. It’s probably best if I have my ear against it, he decided. Then he would have a better chance of hearing if anything went on outside, and if anyone was getting out. 

Did he have everything? From the (somewhat foggy) memories of their meeting in the maintenance building, Hyunjin couldn’t recall if Chris asked them to bring anything of their own with them, though if it were really necessary then the leader would surely have told them again. Oh, screw that! He wasn’t going to make escaping any harder by taking anything. Hyunjin would just have to deal with-

_ Click _ .

The sound would have been faint, nearly inaudible, if Hyunjin had not pressed his head to the door beforehand. This must be it! Hands shaking with excitement, heart pounding, and with his back sweating bullets, the teen straightened up against the door and slowly, quietly, pushed down on the door handle. 

The door swung open, and Hyunjin walked out into the dimly lit hallway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeehaw I'm sorry for the longer than average wait, I really didn't mean to, I swear. 
> 
> Hyunjin, ma boi, we haven't heard from you yet, so here you go.
> 
> ALSO HAPPY (late) BIRTHDAY TO OUR BABY CHANGBIN!!!! Our rapper king, our dancer and vocalist, our binsual, our swole bean, our cake-dropping binnie binnie changbinnie!
> 
> question for all my readers: this part of the fic is slowly coming to an end, though I am by far not done, especcially after their escape. Should I continue adding on to this fic, or should I make a series and write the new stuff as a sequel instead? Tell me what you like, it doesn't make a difference to me!


	12. Sunrise

**W a r n i n g :**

**C o n t a i n m e n t b r e a c h d e t e c t e d i n S e c t o r 4**

Under the howling of alarm sirens, Chris darted towards the main exit. He was sweating like crazy; nervous sweat mingling with the aftereffects of sprinting through half the Facility to get to the main entrance. At one AM precisely, Chris had managed to manually unlock the inmate doors through the Control room, just like Jisung showed him four nights ago, and judging by the sound of the sirens, Woojin just broke through the gate separating Sector 4 from Sector 5. The oldest was tasked with driving the bus, their main escape vehicle, to the parking lot, and that unfortunately required bursting through a few fences. 

No matter, Chris thought as he continued to race through the white hallways, the sirens would have gone off soon enough anyway.

His own footsteps sounded unimaginably loud in his ears, they seemed to echo and bounce off of every white atom in the hallway, every hated white tile. His heart leapt in his chest and threatened to jump out of his mouth if he breathed any harder, but Chris thundered on. Had the corridor always been this long? There, there was the door, the exit, and there was everyb-

There was no one. 

Chris came to a stop in the empty doorway, flanked by the wide open doors. Did they leave? Did everything go according to plan? Where was everybody, where was Felix? No, that couldn’t be! 

He whipped his head around. Were they already here, or not yet? Should he search inside the Facility, or outside?

Luckily, a familiar cry of “Chris!” pointed him in the right direction. There, outside, in the parking lot, surrounded by the wandering automatic searchlights, was a group of seven figures dressed in white. One of them was waving to him, and as he turned on his heel and ran towards them at full speed, he instinctively knew who it was. 

Who else could it be?

“You’re here!” a breathless Felix appeared before him, eyes brighter than ever, even in the half-darkness of the parking lot, and excitedly grabbed his hand.

“Yeah,” Chris croaked and squeezed the small hand tight, just as a bus, the bus Woojin was driving, pulled into the parking lot in front of them. As one, the eight of them broke out into a run towards the vehicle, their way out, their salvation.

It had been a good decision to leave the evacuation to Changbin, he decided in retrospect. While Chris was busy manually unlocking the cell doors, Woojin had made last-minute adjustments to the bus; he said he needed to pack another first aid kit and a few more canned goods and blankets. And, really, it would have been a waste of time for Chris to run all the way back to the inmate cells to pick everyone up, especially since, as the Corrections Officer guessed correctly, the alarms started blaring the second Woojin drove their bus through the gate to Sector 5. But Changbin, Changbin knew what route to take and how to stay out of sight of the many cameras mounted in the Facility. 

True, he’d rendered the most necessary cameras, the ones directly on their escape path, useless, but it was still unwise to take any chances. Chris knew that after this escape, LIONS INC. would use any and every scrap of information on the nine of them to track them down. Better give them as little as possible to work with.

He yanked open the emergency exit doors at the rear end of the bus, and was greeted by a disheveled looking Woojin, sitting in the driver’s seat wearing a black sweater and jeans. It was so jarring to see his coworker in  _ normal _ clothes instead of the white uniform after two years of working together, that Chris had to physically shake his head to regain his composure. 

“Get in,” Woojin shouted at the group of teens over his shoulder, “and put on some normal clothes!”

They didn’t have to be told twice: Those who were already in the bus were extending hands outside and heaving their friends up into the vehicle. The sirens in the Facility were still howling, but the noise seemed distant in Chris’ ears as he watched Jisung hoist a grinning Felix into the bus and close the doors behind him. To his left Hyunjin and Seungmin were already pulling on new clothes, eager to shed the hated white uniforms, with the rest of the group quick to join them. 

The bus was spacious, with its seating rearranged so that the seats were mounted with their backs to the windows and facing inwards. On top of the seats lay piles of clothes, seemingly haphazardly thrown together, and underneath Chris could see boxes containing cans and blankets and first aid kits and jackets. And in the middle of the bus, of course, the white uniforms were being replaced with colorful hoodies, jeans, sweaters, shirts and pants. 

He himself grabbed a plain shirt and a grey hoodie that looked about his size, as well as some jeans, and began changing as well. It felt strange, foreign, seeing these clothes, mostly black and dark… and in such  _ contrast _ to the white he’d worn every day for the past two years on duty, as well as every day in the five years of schooling he’d done to get this job. It looked weird, seeing his own hands handling the grey fabric, seeing his own legs covered not in white but in the rough blue material of his new jeans. 

“Brace yourselves!” came the sudden order from Woojin, and Chris only barely managed to grab onto the back of a seat before he was thrown backwards as the bus broke through the dome. To his right, Hyunjin and a few others were less lucky, stumbling back under the jolt of the bus. 

It was as if they’d broken through glass. The pieces of the shattered dome were flying by the bus’ windows, flickering in and out of existence as sparks erupted like lightning from the torn wires inside. For a second, which felt like both the shortest and the longest second in their lives, the nine of them stood under a rain of light, as if the stars that they couldn’t see during their time in the Facility all decided to fall at the same time.

They looked like the fireflies that Woojin remembered from his childhood in the wide countryside of District 3; the kind that hid in the night fields and were rumored to bring good luck to those who caught them. They reminded Jisung of the lighting he’d see through the windows of his old home on a sheep farm as thunderstorms plagued District 3 sometime every September. They looked like the firework spectacles that were held annually in District 0 to celebrate New Years, LIONS INC. anniversaries, or Summer festivals. They glistened like the fresh snow barricading the bumpy roads and sidewalks in District 5 during winter. 

They looked like the stars that you’d see on a clear night in District 2, lying on your back on the top of a metal roof still warm from the remnants of the afternoon’s sunshine, or standing on one of the wild beaches that were a little farther away from the main towns. Felix’s heart hurt a little bit at the memory, but before he could reach out and touch that intangible feeling of nostalgic melancholy, the bus was already on the other side of the dome.

*** * ***

Seungmin was restless. They’d been driving for what seemed like hours through the dead of night, with only the bus’ headlights to guide them. Around them, the dark shapes of abandoned buildings and factories loomed in the night, and his poor imagination kept going wild.

He shivered and huddled further into his sweater, shuddering as his mind played tricks on him once more. He swore he was seeing something in the corner of his eye, chasing their bus, always just staying out of sight. But that couldn’t be, it must’ve been his paranoia and excitement in this new situation getting the best of him. 

He was glad to be out of the Facility, to be honest. In earnest, he probably would not have had much of a future anyways; what kind of journalist would freely admit to having been to a Corrections Facility? No, if anyone would have found out that Seungmin had been Admitted, then his career, integrity, and reputation would have been over. No, perhaps this was for the better. After all, you’ll never fail something that you haven’t attempted in the first place.

They’d all had some sort of strange past, all nine of them, he assumed. There must be a reason everyone was in the Facility, and a reason why every one of them wanted to escape. Jeongin, he knew, desperately wanted to flee his heritage and inevitable future as head of the Yang chemical branch. Jisung wanted freedom, freedom to create and tinker and engage his brain, and freedom to ignore the rules he so hated. Minho wanted to break free from the sheltered, highly structured, and picture perfect life he’d been living in District 0, micromanaged and regulated and observed and  _ caged _ . Changbin wanted to bring the shady dealings of LIONS INC. to light. What Felix, Chris, and Woojin wanted, he did not know. And Hyunjin? That ignorant boy was probably looking for a way to escape his fated future as Fiver Trash.

It was no secret amongst them that Hyunjin and Seungmin didn’t exactly get along. It wasn’t as bad as the bickering that went on between Hyunjin and Jisung, but Seungmin had grown up being taught pettiness, a quality necessary in the upper classes, and he was not so quick to forget the fight that the slightly older boy picked with him on their fourth day at the Facility. Of course, Seungmin was no liar and was more than ready to admit that he was also at fault for being excessively snarky that day… but let’s be honest, tensions had run high as twenty-eight thrown together teenagers attempted to make sense of the new situation they’d been thrown into. Everyone had been on edge. But still, if Hyunjin wanted to act like Fiver Trash and fight… 

As time passed by, Seungmin could see the surrounding landscape become clearer and clearer as dawn neared. The sunrise was still invisible, but the sky was already fading from a pitch black to a muted navy blue. Underneath them, the wheels of the bus squeaked and groaned as the vehicle travelled roads that had surely not seen a soul in years. The motor had been making a strange noise for a while now, and Seungmin would have been scared that the bus would blow up on them or something, but Jisung gleefully informed the nine of them that the bus was only running out of gas, nothing more. 

Chris had moved forward to the passenger seat next to Woojin, and both of them were actively on the search for some type of shelter that could be their home for the next few months, or maybe forever. The plan was to keep at least a little bit of gas for emergencies, and to sleep in the bus if necessary, all while laying as low as possible. 

We sure strayed far from our intended paths in life, Seungmin mused. In truth, they were all just kids trying to live a better life. Once you wake up and realize that the truth had been hidden away from you, you inevitably deviate from the System that asks so much of you. Would they be reported missing, back at home? What will his parents think when they hear the news? Will they see his disappearance on TV, or would they just discover his face on the back of a milk carton one day?

* * *

Felix stepped out of the bus, following Changbin as they filed out of the vehicle that had come to a stop in something that must have been an old garage. His eyes instinctively scanned his surroundings; the pavement around their feet was cracked and sprouting with weeds, there were broken bits of concrete and rubble lying by the crumbling sides of abandoned buildings, and ancient car models lay dormant and rusting on the sidewalk of what would once have been a road. The building they were in was some kind of old factory, judging by the pipes and large containers all around. 

It had briefly rained this night as the nine of them escaped, but judging by the large puddles all around, the freckled teen suspected that it must have rained the day before as well, and heavily. Taking a few cautious steps, he began walking into the old factory through shattered glass doors overgrown with ivy. It wasn’t a main entrance through which they entered, he soon realized, since they did not walk into anything like a lobby or reception, but instead a winding corridor that lead towards a spiral staircase.

“Up or down?” he asked, turning around to Chris and the rest of the group. Receiving a uniform shrug from his friends (what great decision makers they were), Felix opted for going down underground. They were less likely to be found that way, given that the windows in this factory were probably all broken. Anyway, he felt safer underground.

The spiral staircase ended up leading them to a large open space, with huge pipes running to and fro, half covered by an ankle-deep layer of water that had surely trickled in through the large circular hole in the ceiling. It was the top of some sort of vat, and judging by the criss-cross of beams that ran over the opening, it must have been covered in glass as well. Like a giant window? Felix wasn’t quite sure. 

The rest of them quickly spread out around the new space, exploring what Chris and Woojin had deemed their temporary new home. Jisung was already carrying some sort of car part with him, when did he manage to pick that up?

Something warm brushed his fingertips, and Felix turned around to face Chris, smiling at him, even if it was clear they were both exhausted by the long journey. 

“Just hold my hand, you coward,” he admonished the older, upon which the aforementioned boy let out a bright laugh and grasped his small hand firmly. For a millisecond, Felix had the silly fear that his own hand would be clammy and cold and  _ not good enough _ for Chris, but these thoughts were pushed into the background as warm fuzziness spread from his fingertips all the way up to his heart. 

“What do you think?” Chris put his head on the younger’s shoulder. “Do you like it?”

“Of course, darling. It’s absolutely perfect,” Felix joked and flashed him a shit-eating grin, “how many children do you think we should have?”

Chris’ laughter rang loudly through the factory, bouncing off the walls and echoing in the large space, making the butterflies in the freckled teen’s stomach perform a little happy dance. This was absolutely perfect, he had not been kidding about that. He still couldn’t quite grasp it, couldn’t quite come to terms with this sudden freedom that he had, but it already felt as if a huge weight had been lifted off of his shoulders, leaving him lighter than ever, almost ready to float in joy. 

“District 9,” Chris whispered in his ear, “our District.”

“Hmm. I like it. And what are we?”

“... Stray Kids.”

That was not the answer Felix was expecting. His question, thoroughly laced with connotations and unspoken implications, however, faded into the background as Chris brought a hand up and pointed somewhere to their left. There, on the concrete, Seungmin was just putting the finishing touches on a small ‘s’ in black spray paint, completing a large graffiti tag that read, in black and red, ‘Stray Kids’. Where in the world had he found working spray paint?

“Stray Kids,” Felix mused, “it fits.” It really did. They were stranded, after all, the nine of them out in the middle of nowhere, lost in the best of ways. Strayed from the ideals and expectations of LIONS INC., from their families, from their jobs and futures. He truly did not know, as he tilted his head up towards the large window where dawn had taken over the sky in pastel oranges, pinks, and lavender purples, where their future would lead them, and what tomorrow would bring.

Yet instead of nervous or anxious, Felix just felt incredibly free. Him and Chris, right now they were just two souls in the middle of nowhere, feeling nothing and everything at the same time, simply content, for the moment, with their own existence, holding hands and looking upwards.

Into the unrelenting sunrise. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! This is officially the last chapter of Unrelenting Sunrise, it's been a pleasure providing y'all with some reading material!!
> 
> Once again, I am so incredibly grateful for every single comment, kudos, bookmark, and read that I received over the course of this fic! Special shoutout to Kara_lovelymusic, who has been leaving so many comments on this fic since the beginning and being super nice to me! thank you especcially for always taking the time to give feedback and encourage me, it means the world to me!
> 
> Of course, thank you to everyone who's been reading and commenting. Comments really spur me on, and a lot of time when I don't feel inspired to write I go back and check the comment section of this fic to give myself a motivational boost!
> 
> In this last chapter (almost 2.8k words, phew!) we had a new perspective: Seungmin! We also found out a teeny tiny bit more about this world i've dropped stray kids into, huehuehue. btw, when Seungmin describes Hyunjin as 'Fiver Trash', think of that as LIONS INC slang with the same sort of meaning as 'trailer trash', since District 5 is a notoriously poor slum in LIONS INC. Just a little intricacy of this au ;)
> 
> But this journey is far from over. I plan on continuing with a sequel very soon, so please look out for a fic titled 'Clear Skies of Tomorrow'! It's going to be the follow-up to Unrelenting Sunrise.


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